Well she’s gone now. Helen Thomas has “retired” after her too-public remarks that the Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to the countries their grandparents escaped from.
Cautious columnists wonder whether or not the Hearst chain required her resignation. Oh puh-leeze, she was fired.
After perfunctory condemnations of her anti-Semitism – her colleagues were shocked, shocked, to find out about it after a mere two generations of nasty remarks of that nature, there followed all the usual encomiums about her tough, uncompromising journalism.
Heavy sigh. It continues to surprise me that Thomas is taken seriously as a journalist, purely on the grounds of professionalism.
A journalism teacher (a leftie at that) once told me, “There is one star of the interview – and it isn’t you.”
Every time I’ve seen Thomas at the White House on TV, she wasn’t asking questions, she was making speeches. Followed by a sentence that was technically an interrogative, usually something like, “Why don’t you see what I’m telling you?”
That’s her prerogative in her own column, but at a press conference she was taking time away from journalists who wanted answers. You know, those things we ask questions to get?
So why did the White House, under several different administrations, put up with that crap?
I dunno. First woman on the job maybe? Kid gloves? Maybe no president of either party wants the image of a pres who throws a journalist out of the room.
And maybe it’s precisely because WH press secretaries trying to equivocate and stonewall knew they could use up valuable minutes real journalists might have used to ask real questions, by letting Helen Thomas vent.
P.S. By all means read this grand article by David Harsanyi on, “Why the Helen Thomas case makes me nervous.”
One Response to Ding-dong the witch is dead