Among other things that have their knickers in a twist, the right these days is all worked  up about Obama’s use of the teleprompter.

An empty suit! It’s the emerging meme amongst those who preferred it when Bush put food on his family. You might even say - there’s a market for this meme. And as we’ve noted previously, the dogmatic conservative market is the most slavishly reliable in the world.

You ain’t going broke selling to this crowd.

Which may, then, explain why the Associated Press’s Ron Fournier chose to write his story about last night’s Obama presser this way:

What kind of politician brings a teleprompter to a news conference?

A careful one.

President Barack Obama took no chances in his second prime-time news conference, reading a prepared statement in which he took both sides of the AIG bonus brouhaha and asked an anxious nation for its patience. . . . .

It was a carefully modulated statement, and Obama — relying on a familiar crutch — read it off a flat-screen monitor perched at the back of the East Room.

The teleprompter was no help during the question-and-answer session (reporters don’t signal their intentions), but Obama was no less careful during that give and take. . . .

Notes the Anonymous Liberal:

The only reason to use the word “teleprompter” five times in a 100 word write-up of a presidential press conference is in order to push a meme, a meme that just happens to be popular right now on right wing blogs.

Yes - and extrapolate that out.

If the story is written this way, it is going to be picked up by those blogs. Maybe even Drudge. The story then gets way more attention than it gets otherwise. The number of hits/page views/referrals is way up. That looks good to online advertisers.

And so perhaps you write the story in this fashion not because you agree with the ideological bent (that’s what conservatives always charge that liberals do), but because you see that writing the story this way = greater visibility = more money.

There is or can be a crass calculation involved, in other words. Was there? Dunno. Maybe Fournier merely likes being the right’s favorite “MSM” correspondent. They would say this approach is less biased. But it only achieves that notoriety by being more so.