StateBrief’s Neil Rosekrans is a guest on the Arizona Law Channel. Rosekrans discusses Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu’s recent interview on the Political Cesspool. The Political Cesspool is a Tennessee-based radio show that openly claims a ‘pro-White’ agenda. The media has questioned Babeu for appearing on the show and the Arizona Law Channel sorts out the details…
Brief Blog: Media Misleading on Sheriff Paul Babeu
– July 23, 2010Posted in: Brief Blog, State
Brief Blog: Media Misleading on Sheriff Paul Babeu
About the Author
Neil Rosekrans is a founder and partner of StateBrief.com. He has been a guest political commentator for the Arizona Law Channel, NBC's Sunday Square Off and The Terry Gilberg Show on KFYI. Neil earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell University and earned his MBA and Masters in Public Policy, with an emphasis in International Relations, from Pepperdine University.
Neil and his wife, Beth, live in Scottsdale, Arizona. 
Normally, the charitable assumption would be that Babeu must have been unwitting, esp. given how freely he appears on radio & TV. We don’t only want to assume this for his sake; it’ll be awkward for a lot of us if he turns out to have known what was up. The Cesspool people have promised (or threatened) to set the record straight about their supposed association w/ him, but barring some kind of smoking gun, the natural inclination would be to let the matter rest.
But that was only part of the story. The same media accounts that revealed the Cesspool interview also noted that just one day earlier, Babeu sat for a long interview on The Alex Jones Show. Jones is, of course, more widely known among political professionals than the Cesspool — he’s become sort of the gold standard for lunatic fringe politics. And here, more than w/ the Cesspool, the issue is both where he spoke and what he said. And if what he said is disturbing, it’s no less so when he repeats it in less extreme forums.
Rosekranz fails to mention any of this. (I assume ALMW taped before Babeu’s train-wreck ‘Sunday Square Off’ interview appeared, but the Jones interview had been known from the start.) I think it’s a significant enough part of the story to merit notice, even in a four-minute discussion.
I looked again at the initial media coverage of the story, and don’t find warrant for Rosekranz’s criticism. While the first stories did, inevitably, leave some important questions unanswered — e.g., whether Babeu heard the approbative comparison to David Duke — there’s no reason to conclude they were misleading. The story here is that an ambitious sheriff has revealed himself to be an extremist, and the more appropriate criticism of the media is that it didn’t subject him to the appropriate skeptical scrutiny until he showed up in the political gutter.
This kind of thing is a cancer for conservatives, and utterly unnecessary.
Sounds like the Sheriff got Sherroded!