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Is Illegal Immigration Raising Arizona’s Crime Rate? NY Times Says No; Relevant Figures Say Yes

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

On Sunday, New York Times reporter Randal Archibold offered up more of his slanted reporting on Arizona’s pending new immigration enforcement law, suggesting that supporters of tough immigration enforcement are fostering fear by exaggerating the problem of violent crime on the border with Mexico: ” On Border Violence, Truth Pales Compared to Ideas .” But does his evidence stand up? Two conservative writers say no, pointing to FBI statistics that show crime in towns outside major metropolitan areas and rural counties crime has increased substantially. When Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, announced that the Obama administration would send as many as 1,200 additional National Guard troops to bolster security at the Mexican border, she held up a photograph of Robert Krentz, a mild-mannered rancher who was shot to death this year on his vast property. The authorities suspected that the culprit was linked to smuggling. “Robert Krentz really is the face behind the violence at the U.S.-Mexico border,” Ms. Giffords said. It is a connection that those who support stronger enforcement of immigration laws and tighter borders often make: rising crime at the border necessitates tougher enforcement. But the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as has illegal immigration, according to the Border Patrol . While thousands have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars, raising anxiety that the violence will spread to the United States, F.B.I. statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe. That Mr. Krentz’s death nevertheless churned the emotionally charged immigration debate points to a fundamental truth: perception often trumps reality, sometimes affecting laws and society in the process . Archibold again pompously implied fear-mongering on the part of supporters of immigration enforcement: Moreover, crime statistics, however rosy, are abstract. It takes only one well-publicized crime, like Mr. Krentz’s shooting, to drive up fear. …. Crime figures, in fact, present a more mixed picture, with the likes of Russell Pearce, the Republican state senator behind the immigration enforcement law, playing up the darkest side while immigrant advocacy groups like Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition), based in Tucson, circulate news reports and studies showing that crime is not as bad as it may seem. For instance, statistics show that even as Arizona’s population swelled, buoyed in part by illegal immigrants funneling across the border, violent crime rates declined, to 447 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2008, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available from the F.B.I. In 2000, the rate was 532 incidents per 100,000. Nationally, the crime rate declined to 455 incidents per 100,000 people, from 507 in 2000. Reporter Jennifer Steinhauer seconded Archibold’s assertion about crime dropping on the Arizona border in her Tuesday front-page profile of Sen. John McCain on the campaign trail in Arizona: While border crime has decreased in this state in recent years , the killing of a prominent rancher in the south by what the police suspect was an illegal immigrant set off rage across the state, and helped fuel a tough new state law directed at immigrants. But Tom Maguire researched the actual FBI statistics and came away with the opposite result, though his results are not definitive: …the stats reprinted below tell a different story — measured by violent crimes per 100,000, the non-MSA portion of Arizona has seen a dramatic increase in crime….these numbers do not support the case that the rural and border areas of Arizona are getting safer. Quite the contrary, actually. Maybe the Times can turn a reporter loose on that. Taking off from Maguire’s spadework, Mark Hemingway at the Washington Examiner explained: …essentially, the FBI crime stats are broken down by region and while crime has fallen 20 percent in cities from 2000 to 2008, in towns outside major metropolitan areas and rural counties crime is up 39 and 45 percent, respectively. In other words, it sure looks like crime is way up in the border regions of Arizona.

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Rush Limbaugh Bashes GOP for not standing behind Barton

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

(CNN) – Conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh is taking aim at Republican leaders for rushing to demand Texas Rep. Joe Barton retract his controversial apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward during last week's congressional hearing. On his radio show Monday, Limbaugh suggested the GOP leadership likely agrees with Barton's sentiments, but are driven by recent national polls which suggest the majority of Americans support President Barack Obama's push for BP to set aside $20 billion for future liability claims. “It was a shakedown pure and simple,” said Limbaugh, echoing the words for which Barton later apologized. “And somebody had the audacity to call it what it was and now everybody's running for the hills.” “All you have to do is look at the polling,” Limbaugh continued. “We're talking about Republicans inside the beltway. All you have to do is look at the polling data and media coverage and find out what they are going to do.” Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, quickly faced fire from both the right and the left after apologizing to Hayward during the BP chairman's appearance before his committee Thursday. Hours later – amid threats he would lose his leadership post – Barton retracted the comments. “Let's just slither away under the rock here,” Limbaugh said, mocking the Republicans' approach to Barton. “We'll let Joe Barton get eaten by the Democrat lizards on this to protect ourselves. This is politics and this is the reason why true believers have such a problem with politics. It's just that simple and no more complicated than that.” added by: TimALoftis

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Dem Leader Hoyer: Middle Class Tax Cuts Aren’t ‘Sacrosanct’; WaPo Buries Story on Page A13

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

In a recent interview, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said that the Bush tax cuts that affect the middle class should not be considered “totally sacrosanct.” The number two Democrat in the House of Representatives “acknowledg[ed] that it would be difficult to reduce long-term deficits without breaking President Obama’s pledge to protect families earning less than $250,000 a year,” reported Lori Montgomery in the June 22 Washington Post. That certainly sounds worthy of front-page placement, especially in the midst of a contentious midterm election year, but Post editors instead parked the 9-paragraph story below the fold on page A13 of the print edition and gave it a snoozer of a headline: “Hoyer: Tax cuts need to be examined.” “Middle-class benefit may not be affordable long-term, he says,” the subheader dryly noted. The online version headline gave a similarly bland headline, “Rep. Steny Hoyer says middle-class tax breaks may not be affordable long-term.” At no point in her article did Montgomery raise the question of whether an increased tax burden would be “affordable” to middle class earners weathering a rough and uncertain economy.

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Budget Chief Peter Orszag leaving

Posted on June 22, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag at the Center for American Progress June 8, 2010 in Washington, DC. Orszag is leaving the administration, the Washington Post reported citing a Democrat familiar with his plans, marking the first departure from President Barack Obama#39;s cabinet. White House budget director Peter Orszag is leaving the administration, the Washington Post reported late Monday citing a Democrat familiar with his plans, marking the first departure from Presiden

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WaPo Slams Rasmussen’s Professionalism, But Doesn’t Tell Readers His Critics Are Liberals

Posted on June 18, 2010 by | Leave a comment

The Washington Post ran a story slamming pollster Scott Rasmussen on Thursday on the front page of the Style section. Political reporter Jason Horowitz earnestly channeled the Democratic spin from the story’s beginning: ASBURY PARK, N.J. — Here is a fun fact for those in the political polling orthodoxy who liken Scott Rasmussen to a conjurer of Republican-friendly numbers: He works above a paranormal bookstore crowded with Ouija boards and psychics on the Jersey Shore. Here’s the fact they find less amusing: From his unlikely outpost, Rasmussen has become a driving force in American politics. Democrats surely dislike how Rasmussen’s polls (like this week’s showing Harry Reid losing by 11 points) affect the optimism of their donors and activists. But are his numbers accurate? The Post wanted its readers to know this guy Rasmussen was a scary conservative: he played guitar in a band in high school in Massachusetts called “Rebel’s Confederacy” (racist?!) and he quotes the Bible: He graduated from DePauw University and moved to Charlotte. There he married, started a family and became a devout Methodist. He is given to quoting Scripture, including the principle: “Let every man be quick to listen, but slow to speak, and slow to anger.” (James 1:19.) In the mid-1990s, Rasmussen had discovered the business model of automated polling, and folks he polled heard a recording of his wife reading poll questions. In 1998, heavy traffic crashed his site when Rush Limbaugh unexpectedly told listeners to visit. Two years later, in August 2000, Bill O’Reilly invited him onto his show. He wrote columns for the conservative site WorldNetDaily in 2000. In 2001, he wrote a book advocating the privatization of Social Security. But are his numbers accurate? The pull quote in the story as it continued on page C-9 attacked his professionalism for his newer methods: “The firm manages to violate nearly everything I was taught what a good survey should do.” — Mark Blumenthal, a founder of Pollster.com, speaking about Rasmussen Reports Then there’s this hilarious attack from Daily Kos veteran Nate Silver, soon, a new hire of the New York Times: He “faults Rasmussen for polling only likely voters, which reduces the pool to ‘political junkies.'” Adds Scott Keeter of the Pew Research Center in agreement: “It paints a picture of an electorate that is potentially madder than it really is…And potentially more conservative than it really is.” Would it be wiser for a political candidate to focus on wooing unlikely voters? Jason Horowitz is dishonest for suggesting it’s Rasmussen versus the professionals — and not disclosing that Mark Blumenthal is identified correctly in others stories as a “Democratic pollster,” and not disclosing Nate Silver came from the hard-left Daily Kos, and not even hinting that the Pew Research Center is deeply invested in a series of liberal causes, and whose newest poll (also out Thursday) coos that “The president gets an enthusiastic thumbs up from the world (with the notable exception of the U.S.) for how he has handled the economic crisis.” They can even admit Rasmussen’s critics are liberals in the headline on C-9: “For some, pollster Rasmussen is a minus man.” For some? GOP pollster Ed Goeas, identified as a “Republican pollster,” defends Rasmussen but suggests he take on a Democrat to “balance his analysis” (or to please The Washington Post?) Rasmussen has a “conservative constituency” of Fox, The Washington Times, and the Drudge Report, adds pollster John Zogby insists. No one in the Post is going to suggest that perhaps a pollster for The Washington Post or The New York Times is a “liberal constituency.” How transparently odd. Just like the liberal media elite on a daily basis. For them, the playing field cannot be described as conservative professionals vs. liberal professionals — it’s upstart conservative peasants with pitchforks versus the established objective professionals who define the standards for everyone. Of course, Horowitz left out of his Rasmussen profile his latest poll showing how angry the public is with the media , that two-thirds of respondents are angry and say reporters slant the news to favor candidates they want to win. Instead, we get leftists dismissing Rasmussen numbers as “sorcery” that leads to conservative media bias:   Rasmussen said he is simply a “scorekeeper,” but his spike in clout has sharpened skepticism about how he tracks the dip in Democratic fortunes. Frustrated liberals suspect sorcery. Markos Moulitsas, the creator of the Daily Kos blog, has accused the pollster of “setting the narrative that Democrats are doomed” with numbers that fuel hours of Republican-boosting on talk radio and cable. Pardon conservatives if they might find it laughable that Markos Moulitsas as a polling professional, considering he concocts smear polls of “self-identified Republicans.” But are Rasmussen’s numbers accurate? The caption beneath Rasmussen’s picture brings the disturbing news for liberals: “Scott Rasmussen’s polling detected the groundswell for Scott Brown, who won the special election in Massachusetts for the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Ted Kennedy, earlier than most competitors.” That’s what has them worried about his ability to be a “driving force.”

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CNN Airs Gushing Two-Part Report on ‘Powerhouse’ Anti-Prop 8 Lawyers

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

CNN senior political analyst Gloria Borger returned to her roots as a slanted journalist on Wednesday’s Newsroom with a glowing two-part report on Ted Olson and David Boies, the former rivals in Bush v. Gore who are now fighting to overturn California’s Proposition 8, which outlawed same-sex “marriage.” Borger portrayed their coalition as ” a script that could have been written in Hollywood .” Anchor T. J. Holmes introduced the first part of the analyst’s report just before the bottom of the 1 pm Eastern hour. After noting that closing arguments had begun in the lawsuit against Proposition 8, Holmes stated that the challenge was “the story of two powerhouse lawyers who have turned the partisan divide on its head. Ted Olson, a Republican, and David Boies, a Democrat, famous arch rivals in Bush v. Gore, have now joined together in this fight. It reads like a novel , which may explain why Hollywood had a lot to do with it .” Borger, who, before joining CNN as an analyst in 2007, served as a political correspondent for CBS News , continued on the Hollywood theme: ” It’s a script that could have been written in Hollywood . The opening shot? A lunch in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and it starts where you might expect, with a Hollywood heavy hitter: director and actor, Rob Reiner.” She featured Reiner, a well-known liberal, throughout the first part of her report, as well as Chad Griffin, a former Clinton administration staffer turned activist for same-sex “marriage.” Later, the analyst did her best to establish Olson’s apparent conservative credentials, all the way emphasizing his service to the anti-Proposition 8 cause: OLSON: I’m a lawyer. I represent cases involving the Constitution. This is an important constitutional question. Yes, I think that when we hurt people, when we tell them they’re no good. We tell them that they’re not equal to us, and we say, your loving relationship doesn’t count? The words in the California Constitution are that your relationship is not recognized. What harm do we do? What harm do we do to those individuals every single day, to their family, to their friends? We’re putting a badge on them that says unequal, and that’s contrary to everything we believe in this country. BORGER (voice-over): So Ted Olson took the meeting with Griffin. They kept it a secret, though. BORGER (on-camera) Here you are with Donald Rumsfeld. BORGER (voice-over) After all, Olson is a conservative legal icon. BORGER (on-camera) Of course, one of the first things you see when you walk through your door in this office is a picture of Ronald Reagan. OLSON: He was a wonderful, wonderful man to know and to work for. And, of course, President Bush is here, too. BORGER (voice-over): That would be Bush 43. FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: And I will to the best of my ability- BORGER: The President whose election Olson successfully defended before the Supreme Court in 2000, a memory that wasn’t lost on Chad Griffin. GRIFFIN: I knew I was in foreign territory. But I saw enough in that office to know just how Republican- you know, of a world that Ted Olson comes from, and my world could not be more different than that. Near the end of the first part of her report, Borger revisited her show business theme as she noted the former solicitor general’s partnership with his former adversary in the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, David Boies: BORGER: … Olson made another move right out of central casting . He wanted to hire a co-counsel. Of all people, the liberal David Boies, his former Supreme Court rival, the man he beat in Bush versus Gore. The director [Reiner] loved it. REINER: And then when he suggested that we get David Boies to be his co-counsel, I thought- wow. To get the two guys who opposed each other on Bush v. Gore, to team up was saying that this is a nonpartisan issue. GRIFFIN: They share an abiding belief- BORGER: Not to mention, irresistible public relations. WHALEN: I think Ted recognized that this odd bedfellows combination, so to speak, would get a lot of attention. BORGER (on-camera): So people call them the odd couple. WHALEN: Well, it’s- it is a very odd couple, isn’t it? BORGER( voice-over): Or is it? judge for yourself. OLSON: As we were getting ready to argue Bush versus Gore, did we have this conversation? BOIES: Yes- exactly- in the chamber, in the chamber. OLSON: We said, someday, someone is going to come to us who will want to get married, and they’ll be gay. And we’ll do this together. We actually talked about that. BOIES: That second part I don’t remember. More than forty-five minutes later, Borger aired the second part of her report, but instead of interviewing Olson and Boies’s opponents in the lawsuit, she decided to continue her beyond sympathetic profile of the anti-Proposition 8 lawyers, focusing on how the two are “now friends- really good friends” and how the two discuss their tastes in movies and wine: BORGER (voice-over): It was the historic case that decided the presidency and divided the nation. Olson and Boies were the ones on the steps of the Supreme Court battling it out. That was then. This is now. On the streets of New York, they’re talking anything but the law. TED OLSON: It’s called ‘Crazy Heart.’ DAVID BOIES: Oh, I know. OLSON: Jeff Bridges. BOIES: I know. I know. I haven’t seen that. OLSON: Have you seen it? BOIES: I haven’t seen that. I want to see that though and ‘Avatar.’ OLSON: Yes. BORGER: They’ve come a long way….The adversaries are now friends, really good friends. And when we asked to meet with them, they suggested a personal spot, David Boies’ apartment in New York City. BORGER (on-camera): If anybody had said to me nine years ago that I would be about to be interviewing the two men who fought each other tooth and nail in Bush versus Gore on the same side of a constitutional fight, I would have said, are you crazy?… BORGER (voice-over): Politics aside, their wives joke that they’re like an old married couple . They go biking together and both enjoy the finer things. BORGER (on-camera): But what do you like about each other? BOIES: Where shall we start? Shall we start with the wine or the bike trips? BORGER: Yes, let’s start with the wine. After a long day, a glass of- BOIES: A glass, definitely. OLSON: Chardonnay. BOIES: Yes, Chardonnay. CNN, who earlier this year, touted itself as the only “non-partisan” cable news network , has all but made it clear that it is out to promote same-sex “marriage.” On June 9, correspondent Soledad O’Brien previewed her upcoming one-sided documentary , “Gary and Tony Have A Baby,” for the left-wing Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. O’Brien also filed a sympathetic report about a lesbian teenager in Mississippi on Tuesday. After Borger’s report, Holmes himself promoted his colleague’s documentary: “And also, reminder to our viewers, coming up here on CNN, just a few days, the concept of family can mean one thing to you, can mean something else to another . And our Soledad O’Brien, following a same-sex couple in their struggle against the legal and personal obstacles to becoming parents. C an these men achieve a life as mainstream as their parents? Watch ‘Gary and Tony Have a Baby.'”

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NY Times Departing Public Editor Hoyt: We’re Not the Fox News of the Left

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

Clark Hoyt filed his last column as the New York Times’s Public Editor: ” A Final  Report From Internal Affairs, ” praising the cooperation of Times reporters and editors during his term and fending off accusations that the paper is a “liberal rag.” Hoyt admitted the editorial page and columnists are liberal and that the paper “shares the prevailing sensibilities of the city and region where it is published,” but denied the Times was “really the Fox News of the left,” citing scandalous scoops that hurt prominent Northeastern Democrats like New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer. Hoyt was the paper’s third public editor in an experiment that had its roots in the Jayson Blair catastrophe . In retrospect, the paper’s first ombudsman, Daniel Okrent, was probably the toughest critic of the paper’s reporting. Okrent famously asked the rhetorical question in a July 2004 column: ” Is the Times a liberal newspaper? Of course it is .” His successor Barney Calame was far too much a corporate yes-man; he initially defended the paper’s exposure a U.S. terrorist surveillance program involving international bank transfers, though he later recanted . Hoyt was somewhere in the middle, and perhaps the least predictable when it came to which controversies he considered worth writing about. Each of my predecessors, Daniel Okrent and Byron Calame, faced some degree of resistance from the newsroom, and I do not think anyone thought it would go down easy for me. On my first day on the job, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, sat opposite me in a little room off his office, clapped his hands on his knees and said with a laugh: “Well, you’re here. You must be dumber than you look.” But my reception by the newsroom turned out to be accepting and unfailingly professional, in large part, I believe, because Okrent and Calame persevered, established the position and made it matter. Times journalists have been astonishingly candid, even when facing painful questions any of us would want to duck. Of course, journalists don’t relish being criticized in public any more than anyone else. A writer shaken by a conclusion I was reaching told me, if you say that, I’ll have to kill myself. I said, no, you won’t. Well, the writer said, I’ll have to go in the hospital. I wrote what I intended, with no ill consequences for anyone’s health. …. For all of my three years, I heard versions of Kevin Keller’s accusation: The Times is a “liberal rag,” pursuing a partisan agenda in its news columns. There is no question that the editorial page is liberal and the regular columnists on the Op-Ed page are heavily weighted in that direction. There is also no question that The Times, though a national newspaper, shares the prevailing sensibilities of the city and region where it is published. It does not take creationism or intelligent design as serious alternatives to the theory of evolution. It prints the marriages and commitment ceremonies of same-sex couples. It covers art and cultural events out on the edge. Hoyt next defended his paper’s balance by focusing on the Times breaking political scandals against Democrats in its backyard. While not quite denying the paper’s liberal slant, Hoyt said the Times was definitely not the Fox News of the left. But if The Times were really the Fox News of the left , how could you explain the investigative reporting that brought down Eliot Spitzer, New York’s Democratic governor; derailed the election campaign of his Democratic successor, David Paterson; got Charles Rangel, the Harlem Democrat who was chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, in ethics trouble; and exposed the falsehoods that Attorney General Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, another Democrat, was telling about his service record in the Vietnam era? Of course, as the Times is always reminding us, the Republican Party has been decimated in the Northeast in recent years, meaning the region is dominated by Democrats, meaning most political scandals will involve Democrats. Hoyt also announced a new public editor from outside the paper would be named soon.

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NYT Reports Whitman’s 2007 ‘Shove’, Ignores Brown Calling Her Nazi Last Week

Posted on June 15, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

Americans learned something interesting about the priorities of the New York Times Tuesday: its editors believe a political candidate pushing an employee three years ago is more important than a candidate calling his campaign rival a Nazi last week. Such seems apparent from the Times’ choice to report  California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman’s alleged employee shoving incident in 2007. By contrast, the Gray Lady has still not informed readers that Democrat gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown last Tuesday likened Whitman to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. As NewsBusters reported Saturday, Brown said the following to KCBS radio’s Doug Sovern: Brown boasted about his legendary frugality. “I’ve only spent $200,000 so far. I have 20 million in the bank. I’m saving up for her.” It’s true – his stay-on-the-sidelines, bare-bones primary run cost him almost nothing, at least in California political terms. But he also fretted about the impact of all those eBay dollars in Whitman’s very deep pockets. “You know, by the time she’s done with me, two months from now, I’ll be a child-molesting…” He let the line trail off. “She’ll have people believing whatever she wants about me.” Then he went off on a riff I didn’t expect. “It’s like Goebbels,” referring to Hitler’s notorious Minister of Propaganda. “Goebbels invented this kind of propaganda. He took control of the whole world. She wants to be president. That’s her ambition, the first woman president. That’s what this is all about.”  Although a week has passed since this incident, and Brown has admitted having the conversation with Sovern, the Times has STILL not reported his remarks. Yet, as NewsBusters reported Tuesday, Whitman allegedly pushing an eBay employee THREE YEARS AGO — an incident that “no one else appears to have witnessed” — was something the Times devoted almost 1,000 words to citing exclusively unnamed sources:  In addition to noting that the incident involved has no identified witnesses, The Times report specifically tells us that the matter was settled through mediation, and that “the authorities were not involved.” Former eBay CEO Whitman has no criminal exposure. The report is a gratuitous, politically-motivated dredge-up of a long-forgotten matter. The Times’s Brad Stone and likely other reporters clearly put many hours of work into the Whitman report. In the process, he or they encouraged and ultimately convinced eBay employees to breach ethics and to violate confidentiality agreements. The incident’s alleged victim still works at eBay and has clearly moved on. Yes, everyone involved has likely moved on EXCEPT the Times which felt this three-year-old issue was important to share with its readers. Yet something that just happened last week involving Whitman — her being compared to a Nazi by Brown — is STILL not something Times editors feel readers should be aware of. On a related note, the Times also found Republican Senatorial candidate Carly Fiorina’s comments about Sen. Barbara Boxer’s (D-Calif.) hair quite newsworthy filing reports on the open mike quip Friday and Sunday. As such, a Republican allegedly pushing an employee three years ago or commenting about a campaign rival’s hair is more important to the Times than a Democrat calling his political foe a Nazi. Honestly, this is the kind of media bias one would expect in Cuba and Venezuela – NOT America. 

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Kucinich Predicts Health Care Will Pass by One Vote

Posted on June 14, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

Congressman Dennis Kucinich predicted Saturday that the health reform bill will win passage in the House on Sunday by just one vote. Kucinich likened the bill to “the political equivalent of castor oil” but said he has been working to get remaining holdout Democrats to vote for it. The Ohio Democrat, who earlier was a holdout himself, made the comments in an interview conducted by Truthdig Managing Editor Peter Z. Scheer and podcast producer Joshua Scheer. truthdig_kucinich_health_care_switch.mp3

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Will the White House Press Corps Get Wimpier Without Helen Thomas?

Posted on June 13, 2010 by Benny Hollywood| Leave a comment

Jon Ward of the Daily Caller, until recently a White House reporter for the Washington Times, wrote a piece for Sunday’s Washington Post titled “Why we’ll miss Helen Thomas.” But Ward also interviewed some White House press colleagues who suggested Thomas had ventured across a line into explicit advocacy and argument: “Helen had always been a tough, no-nonsense interrogator of presidents and press secretaries,” said Ann Compton, who has reported on the past six presidents for ABC News. “About a decade ago, when she shed her role as reporter and began a career at Hearst as an opinion columnist, Helen’s questions began to cross the line into advocacy.” Ward wrote that as “zany and obvious” her advocacy had become, he wondered if other reporters couldn’t learn something about a little bit tougher on press secretary Robert Gibbs. Fox reporter Major Garrett admitted to Ward “that until the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico became a major story, the White House press corps (himself included) had often failed to adequately hold Gibbs’s feet to the fire.” He explained: “There had long been an unnecessary deference and sort of delicacy and decorum about waiting to be called upon, and rigidly adhering to what is essentially a manufactured process that Robert sought to achieve at the very beginning,” Garrett said. He added that the dynamic of the press room works best when reporters are free to follow up and really push the press secretary, but “that has been extremely rare, for whatever reason.” Ward offered a few examples he felt showed excessive deference: A couple of incidents come to mind. At a briefing just one week after Obama’s inauguration, for example, only two reporters pressed Gibbs for details about the president’s knowledge of a drone strike in Pakistan — the first military action of the new administration — and they received no backing from colleagues in the room when he refused to discuss it. And more recently, in the June 3 briefing, Gibbs faced only a few scattered questions on the announcement by Colorado Senate candidate Andrew Romanoff that a top White House official had dangled three job possibilities in front of him should he drop his challenge to the incumbent Democrat, Michael Bennet. Ward didn’t explore the idea that the bosses of these White House reporters weren’t truly interested in pressing Gibbs. Even as several reporters asked for answers on job offers to Romanoff and Pennsylvania’s Joe Sestak, the networks never put the non-answers of Gibbs on the air to create pressure for more disclosure. Persistent questions by reporters alone doesn’t move the news needle. Their bosses also have to find it essential to get answers out of Gibbs.

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