A journalist in the United States recently interviewed a man who said he had been “birched” by the conspiracy theories surrounding President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.
The man said he was a “bobblehead birther”, and his explanation to The Australian’s correspondent was simple: “Obama is a fraud.”
This is the first time that a journalist in Australia has been asked to explain how the term “bitterroot” originated.
In a series of tweets, the Australian journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, said she had been sent an email by a reporter asking for the “origin” of the word.
“I thought it was a great idea, to have this conversation and then ask you why it’s not,” she wrote.
The journalist said the conversation went on for a while and then “it was like a conversation I’ve had in another country”.
She did not say why she thought this was a good idea.
“I was genuinely curious about why this particular question was being asked, so I started looking into it,” she said.
The journalist’s answer to the question was simple.
“Obama is [sic] a fraud,” it read.
I thought he was trying to make a joke, but the irony of his words was amazing to me.
It is not the first interview that the Australian has been subjected to this way.
In January, the ABC’s chief political correspondent, Katharine Murphy, was told to answer a question about a story on a website that claimed the Australian government had a plan to pay for the removal of a statue of the Australian prime minister.
But Murphy was unable to explain what that plan was.
“The story is that you’ll get a piece of paper and then you’re going to have to go to the [Australian] parliament, get the bill passed, and then we’re going away from this statue,” she was told.
Murphy did not know what that meant, but she was not prepared to take it seriously.
“You don’t want to be the prime minister of Australia, so you’re gonna have to have a piece with a name that doesn’t look like your name,” she told the reporter.
“And that’s the name on the piece of parchment.”
Murph said she asked the reporter why she didn’t know more.
“He just gave me the impression that the only thing that you could be was a ‘bitter root’ person,” Murphy said.
“This is what I was expecting, that the whole thing was all a bit of a joke.”
The ABC is still not clear how “bitchroot” was chosen as a name.
The word “bastard” appears in the title of an article that the journalist wrote about an interview she had with a former US congressman, who was accused of having links to the CIA.
“Bastard is a word I never thought I would hear used in a conversation about the ‘bobbledegook’,” the article reads.
“It’s the same word that my mother used to describe my father’s ‘bastards’ in a derogatory way, which I suppose is why she’d call them bastards.
He was a crook, I guess.”
The reporter was also asked to elaborate on why she said that “basterds” were “the same kind of people” who are “always making it hard for us”.
“Basterds are the same type of people that are always making it difficult for us,” she replied.
“But the thing that really bothered me about it is, is that they have a right to be angry, and they are angry, but they don’t get to be a bitch.
They get to do what they want to do.”
The journalist did not elaborate.
She was then asked to clarify what she meant by “buster”.
“I meant the person who would never make it to the final destination,” she answered.
“When you’re a buster, you’re an asshole.”
In a later interview, Murphy explained that she was “embarrassed” and “a little embarrassed” for her answer.
Her response was, in part, that she did not think “busting” meant she was making a “bad joke”.
“Busting is just a word,” she explained.
“You know, it means ‘I was born that way, and I didn’t like it’.”
Murphy said she was surprised that the reporter “didn’t get the sense that it was intended as a negative or derogatory term.”
“It was just an honest response,” she added.
“There’s nothing wrong with a person who’s angry about something they perceive as being unfair.”
She did say that she thought the term was “a great term to have in a podcast”.
“Because you don’t really get to
