By now there isn't a political reporter alive who hasn't written a story about the "serious question" whether Bush campaign media consultant Alex Castellanos deliberately inserted the word "rats" -- as a subliminal message -- into one frame of a television ad criticizing Al Gore's Medicare proposals. Because they are professionals, of course, all these press types have actually seen the ad in question, multiple times. And each has also made independent inquiries about what other, more obvious explanation there might be for the now-famous rodent sighting.
Consequently, every such journalist knows full well, and knew it when he was writing about Rat-gate, that: (1) the word "rats" in Castellanos's ad isn't "subliminal" at all; you can see it quite clearly; (2) "rats" isn't the word Castellanos would have chosen if he had intended to insert a subliminal message; (3) subliminal advertising is a folk myth in any case; (4) Castellanos would have to be an imbecile to bother with such a useless trick; (5) Castellanos isn't an imbecile; and (6) what we have here, instead, is an example of a ubiquitous Madison Avenue video technique: a computer-generated optical illusion whereby a few letters from some larger forthcoming caption (in this case "bureaucrats decide") are briefly flashed on screen -- so that the full set of words then appears to fly onto the viewer's field of vision from behind his head.
In other words, not a single knowledgeable reporter in America actually believes it's possible that the Bush campaign and Alex Castellanos intended to do anything underhanded with this ad. Guaranteed.
But the newsies are nevertheless reporting the "controversial ad" as if it might be a genuine, deliberate dirty trick. And they are reporting the "appalled" reactions of know-nothing academic "media experts" and other Democrats as if those complaints might be sincere.
Why is that?