NYT's suspicious Fred Thompson story

While I'm amused by the New York Times anecdote about Fred Thompson asking an audience for applause, I don't trust it or the rest of the story and you shouldn't either. Given the tone of Adam Nagourney's report, there's good reason to be suspicious that he is fitting the facts to the "Fred is lazy" narrative, especially if you know about the horrors of the "Gore is a liar" coverage of 1999-2000.

Update 10/8 8:38 PM: Via commenter TCW, Thompson's request for applause is on YouTube and appears to be legit:

I remain suspicious about narrative-driven reporting on Thompson, however.

Comments

[TCW]

While I generally agree that we should be be skeptical of media narratives, this one may actually be true. It's certainly the case that he had to ask for applause at one Iowa gathering, as seen in this embarrassing video:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=n70nDi4XRC8

[jen]

Some of us are very familiar with Nagourney's twisting of the facts. I take everything he writes with a bucketful of salt.

[Sean-B]

I don't understand the point of speculating on a writer's credibility without posting links to some kind of information that supports that it is false. Since it's almost impossible to escape some kind of documented media of an event, especially one involving a Presidential candidate, it should be easy to corroborate. The Youtube video above appears to be the actual event that Nagourney was writing about.

[Marie]

The video was on the Colbert Report, too. Stephen Colbert offered some good pointers for Thmpson: now I really want to see the video of Fred Thompson trying to warm up a crowd by yelling the name of their city...