Trusted, non-fake journalists buy it when Barry Switzer claims Trump named him 'Secretary of Offense'

From the people who spent all of last week hyperventilating about the horrors of "fake news," and breathlessly informing us that we must start trusting the mainstream media because they're, you know, trustworthy, and know stuff. OK.

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If you don't know who Barry Switzer is, that's OK. You're probably not a football fan, or haven't been one for very long. A guy who has a Super Bowl championship and lots of college success on his record is going to be widely recognized when he strolls into a very high-profile public building, and Switzer was when he happened to be in New York and decided to check out Trump Tower. What did he do there? Get a coffee. No big deal. It's open to the public and you or I could easily do the same. But then he was spotted by some of the fearless heroes of the Fourth Estate. What did you meet with the president-elect, about, Coach Switzer? Heh. And so the fun began:

Media widely reported Trump met with Barry Switzer, the former University of Oklahoma and Dallas Cowboys coach who has known Trump for decades. But Switzer said he was shopping with his wife and daughter on Fifth Avenue and decided to walk into the Trump Tower lobby after seeing the Naked Cowboy. He had no meeting scheduled.

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"All the media people said, 'Coach what are you doing here,'" Switzer said in an interview. "I told them I was here to see the president like everyone else." Switzer said he instead went upstairs in Trump Tower, bought a coffee at Starbucks and came back downstairs. "I told the reporters I had a great visit, and that we were going to make the wishbone great again," he said. "I told them I was going to be Secretary of Offense and that Trump knew how to run the ball down the field." "Then I went back to my hotel and laughed my ass off," he said, still laughing this week. "It went everywhere. Everyone believed it. I had all these calls, but I was just jerking people around."

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Remember when stuffy newspaper types would scoff at bloggers and tell you they were so much better because they had "layers and layers of editors and fact-checkers"? Yeah. About that. They don't have as many now because their business model's been failing for decades and they've been cutting personnel. That's no excuse for four Michigan newspapers running a front-page headline on Monday announcing "Lions roped by Dallas Cowboys." (The Lions had lost to the Giants.) But it's a good reminder that one of their favorite defenses of themselves and their old guard no longer applies. But that's not even the point here. These people stand around in the Trump Tower lobby looking for some news to break, and when they think they've got something, they're not running it through "layers and layers of editors and fact-checkers." They're tossing it up there on Twitter faster than Barry Switzer can get through that gold-plated revolving door and back to his hotel. And some of these people are so clueless, they don't know that there's no such thing as the Secretary of Offense. It sounds plausible to them! Anyone can make a mistake. Maybe the people who do so regularly should stop attacking others' work as "fake," when it's far from a safe bet that you can trust them to get just about anything at all right.

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