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July 17, 2006

A Lawn Gnome of Journalism Comes Up Defensive

by AltHippo @ 11:08 am. Filed under Iraq, hacks

Helen Thomas hurt Dana Milbank’s feelings. No, really.

Here’s what she said:

“Nothing is more troubling to me than the obsequious press during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq,” she tells us, citing pulled punches at news conferences. “Critics are still wondering why White House reporters were so quiescent at President Bush’s March 6, 2003, news conference, which was scripted and in which he , or perhaps made it eminently clear that the United States was going to war. . . . White House reporters
became a laughingstock before the viewing public, who wondered about all the ’softballs’ being pitched to the president at such a momentous time.”

Milbank then lists a series of questions he considers, one supposes, hard-hitting, then asks: “This is quiescent and obsequious?”

If you look closely, however, you’ll notice that Milbank takes segments of much larger questions. The rest of the question tends to dilute the “tough” part. I’ll take an example from the press conference with emphasis around the part Milbank uses for his article:

Q Mr. President, to a lot of people, it seems that war is probably inevitable, because many people doubt — most people, I would guess — that Saddam Hussein will ever do what we are demanding that he do, which is disarm. And if war is inevitable, there are a lot of people in this country — as much as half, by polling standards — who agree that he should be disarmed, who listen to you say that you have the evidence, but who feel they haven’t seen it, and who still wonder why blood has to be shed if he hasn’t attacked us.

The context, in this case that “war is probably inevitable”, that Saddam Hussein would never cooperate, etc., indicates that the questioner believes that those “who still wonder why blood has to be shed if he hasn’t attacked us” are misinformed. That’s a completely different meaning than the excerpt Milbank uses.

Now, I also disagree with Helen Thomas’s word choice. I would have used words like obeisant, sycophantic, or perhaps toadying to describe questions like this one: (transcript)

Q Mr. President, as the nation is at odds over war, with many organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus pushing for continued diplomacy through the U.N., how is your faith guiding you? And what should you tell America — well, what should America do, collectively, as you instructed before 9/11? Should it be “pray?” Because you’re saying, let’s continue the war on terror.

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15 Responses to “A Lawn Gnome of Journalism Comes Up Defensive”

  1. Ken Shepherd Says:
    July 17th, 2006 at 12:25 pm

    Dude, you should call the blog Alternative Reality.

    Milbank is far from a conservative garden gnome in the Washington press tea party.

    And Thomas is far from an objective purveyor of news. Granted she’s a columnist, but by training she is as journalist and she owes it to her readers, her colleagues, the profession at large, and the American people to use her questions to the White House press secretary to solicit information, not to preach a leftist message.

  2. Avedon Says:
    July 17th, 2006 at 8:57 pm

    not to preach a leftist message

    What? Has Helen Thomas been making speeches advocating that the government take the commercial sector?

  3. AltHippo Says:
    July 17th, 2006 at 9:10 pm

    Umh, Ken, regardless of whether Milbank is conservative or liberal, he’s distorting the meaning of what he’s quoting by taking it out of context. Way out of context if you look at the quote.

    Also, Helen Thomas, to the best of my knowledge is not pushing for state ownership of business. If anything, she is more concerned about journalists becoming lapdogs.

  4. QrazyQat Says:
    July 18th, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    A free press, apparently, is a leftist message, which all those leftist founding fathers bequeathed to us.

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