Rita Cosby
From Demopedia
A couple of years ago, when somebody ranted against her, a DUer said, "Leave Rita alone. I knew her when she was a local reporter and she is SWEET." With that in mind, a monitoring of her on Faux for a year or two yielded this take:
She is a hustler (in the hard-working sense). She gets out there and beats the bushes (if not the Shrubs). She literally pounded the landfill of that Utah wife and the shore of the PETERSON wash-up.
Her territory is the same as Whorealdo's, but with a touch more delicacy. Her thing is to "get" Bad Boys. She pen pal-ed with McVEIGH and BERKOWITZ. She telephone-interviewed MILOSEVIC. She beats out others on the same stories because she gets on the inside of whatever the hottest tabloid story of the day is: She has a long list of the actual Bad Boys notched on her interview belt. But if she can't "get" the main interviewee (CONDIT or PETERSON), she will get a family member, a neighbor, or the neighbor's dog.
Her method? She sweet-talks the culprits on their "good" side and their nearest and dearest to boot. Unlike Whorealdo who screams at Charles MANSON, she approaches her targets as flawed humans who have at least a tiny particle of goodness, perhaps even with some true or calculated spirituality. If anybody saw Whorealdo "interview" MANSON years ago, you saw him scream epithets and profanities at him. Yes, the names-called and Whorealdo's reactions are TRUE, but it's not a technique that will yield insight into how the target's mind works or even document actual events of the story.
When Whorealdo defecated, uh, defected, to Faux, he made the obligatory tour of all the Faux circuses, swearing allegiance to his new Wingnut gods. O'LOOFAH said to him, "What to you bring to Faux that we don't already have?" It was true. His show followed Rita's and both of them were usually on the same stories, but Rita was scooping him on all the "gets".
After his first couple of years, when he was feeling secure enough at Faux, he started showing pique. Once both he and COSBY were promo-ing their own circuses on an earlier Faux circus, sitting side by side in a Two shot. It was clear that COSBY had the better "gets" on the same story and Whorealdo was FURIOUS. He was STEAMING and wouldn't even look at her. She finally reached over and put her hand on his knee, much as Aunt Bee might do, which probably made him MORE furious.
The degree of her Wingnuttiness is up in the air. Her stuff tends to be more of the tabloid human interest variety more than ideology, but time will tell as she starts on MSRNC.