Mississippi reporter Larrison Campbell was asked to produce a male chaperone for her day shadowing GOP gubernatorial hopeful Robert Foster so as to avoid the possibility of a smear campaign about sexual involvement between the two. In an article she wrote for Mississippi Today about herself for some reason, Campbell claimed that, “My editor and I agreed the request was sexist and an unnecessary use of resources.”
As with all partisan cat-fights, the incident was a win for both sides. The whole world now knows that Foster is straight and married. They know he’s Christian–after all, he only requested a male chaperone because he and his wife follow the “Billy Graham rule,” which is not “tell people what they want to hear so they will give you money.” The Billy Graham rule is a simple practice of not letting two unmarried persons of the opposite gender spend time alone together. Which is how we know that this guy…
thinks he has a chance with this lady:
Foster, according to people who will purposely misread (or not?) Campbell’s account, is a red-blooded, married and totally not gay, capital-R “Republican.” Win.
And then there’s Campbell, who “joined the Mississippi Today reporting team March 2016, a week before the site’s official launch.” As with all modern reporting, this is about getting clicks, and it’s working. Check out this jump in Twitter followers just two days after the July 9th article was published.
I couldn’t find anything on Wayback that was older than the 11th, but to have even those five hundred adds in less than twenty four hours is a ten percent increase. The clicks will follow. I’ve been on Mississippi Today all morning.
There are two other political reporters at Today, both are white men. It’s not inherently suspicious that Today sent a female political reporter to, well, report politics. But it is interesting that they had reporter Adam Ganucheau cover the two older candidates and Campbell to only cover the youngest one. The one most likely to create some sort of tension.
It also helps that he’s religiously and vocally conservative on a Ben Shapiro level, which ensured that some sort of controversy would have come of his being reported on by Campbell.
But the most important part is that Campbell is hot, because it makes her more likely to be involved with a politician. Not in actuality, mind you, but in the prejudiced minds over at Fox News. And yet rather than give their article the conservative twist as was expected, Fox News reported the incident exactly as Campbell reported it. I’m not kidding.
Well, almost exactly. They took the unbiased, centrist point of view, and reported exclusively from Campbell’s original article from Today. What’s more, Fox News, long lampooned for only hiring fair-skinned 10’s as reporters, did not include a single photo of Campbell in their article. Nor did they include one of Foster, only a shot of his Twitter feed. It’s damn interesting to me. Perhaps they’re taking the back seat here and letting the liberal publications push conservatives into their open arms.
Campbell and Mississippi Today were expecting some sort of bout with Foster, albeit after Campbell was able to shadow Foster. They were planning a divisive liberal-heavy piece that would drive readers to their publication. They weren’t expecting conservatives to make it so easy.
