Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

So the Washington Post today touts a story which is so full of fluff, it makes cotton candy look like a nutritious meal. The e-mail teaser for the story is “Is Mitt Romney loosening up?” The story itself is headlined, “Mitt Romney receives newfound enthusiasm from Republicans.” Now that could be an accurate assessment, if it weren’t for the purely anecdotal and cliched structure of the story. [...]

Mitt Romney is still awkward sometimes, a bit robotic and stilted at the lectern. But a turnabout seems to be happening: Voters say they are seeing him through a new prism.

“He’s not stiff. He’s letting his own human nature through, talking like you and I are talking now, not guarded and watching what he’d say,” Marge Sowa, 69, said of the Republican presidential candidate after sizing him up at a pancake breakfast in Brunswick, Ohio, during his tour of potential battleground states. “He showed personality – oh, big time. He was one of the guys.”

And then there’s the perennial “regular guy” paragraph:

In a New Hampshire park, he scooped ice cream (mostly vanilla); along a Pennsylvania highway, he stopped by a Wawa convenience store for a meatball hoagie; in Ohio, he served pancakes at an apple orchard on Father’s Day; and along the Mississippi River in Iowa, he went on a riverboat cruise and briefly took the steering wheel for a photo op.

[...]

On page two of the Post article it makes this admission:

Romney’s advisers say that little has changed about the candidate. And they are right. His speeches still are practiced odes to free-market economics. He’s still darting between dusty factories and staged rallies, with the same “Born Free” rock anthem and oversize American flags.

[...]

What it is really about is corporate media journalism that fails the needs of a nation in crisis. [...]

And Rucker reads into Romney’s mind, “The candidate wandered down the aisle to chat with reporters, confident enough now to make fun of one of his more awkward gaffes from the primaries.”

Oh, my, this is what passes for the nation’s top journalism?

Please read the whole post here.