Helen Thomas? Yeah, Right!

After reading the latest column from Helen Thomas, I had to double check the calender to make sure it wasn’t April 1st because it’s hard to believe anyone could stoop to this level of self-parody. Here we have a blatantly partisan liberal columnist — who goes to White House press conferences and asks ridiculous questions — sniffing that bloggers don’t measure up as journalists because we’re not objective enough. Yeah, right!

Check out the finger wagging from Thomas:

“One does wonder where the lines are these days that distinguish between legitimate reporters and anyone who has a laptop computer or a Web site.

Where do the bloggers fit in? They may have something to say — and nobody is stopping them. Still, the description “journalist” does not apply to what they do.

Edward Wasserman, a professor of journalism at Washington & Lee University, defines a journalist as someone who “is professionally dedicated to truth seeking.” He conceded that although the whole job description “has gotten muddied,” Gannon shouldn’t be considered a journalist.

Gannon was a propagandist, a flack for the White House. Thus, he fails to meet the requirement — as Wasserman wrote in the Miami Herald last September — that “anybody who enters the (journalism) profession makes a core commitment to do his or her best to determine and tell the truth.”

Tom Rosenstiel, head of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said the proper question is not whether you call yourself a journalist, but whether your work constitutes journalism.

“A journalist tries to get the facts right” and tries to get close to a “verifiable truth,” not to take sides but “to inspire public discussion,” he said.

This isn’t a requirement for bloggers with axes to grind.”

Oh, I see: Bloggers have “axes to grind” whereas journalists try not to “take sides.” It’s funny to hear that coming from a woman who asked questions like these at White House press conferences:

Helen Thomas: “My follow-up is, why does (George Bush) want to drop bombs on innocent Iraqis?” — January 6, 2003

Helen Thomas: “Is this (war) revenge, 11 years of revenge?” — January 6, 2003

Here’s more on Ms. “Objective Reporter” from Slate:

“I dare say that if you were Bush or his handlers, you’d pass her over at a press conference, too. Her loathing for Bush is palpable. “This is the worst president ever,” she told the Torrance, Calif., Daily Breeze in January. “He is the worst president in all of American history.” Though Thomas never masked her crush on Democrats when she worked as a news writer, she comes completely out of the closet in her columns, ripping “Bush’s headlong drive into war, his favor-the-rich economic policy and his campaign to put right-wing ideologues on the Supreme Court.” As the child of Lebanese immigrants, Thomas knows exactly which religious button she’s pushing when she repeatedly condemns Bush’s plans for war on Iraq as a “crusade.”

So Thomas says that Bush is the “worst president in all of American history?” Wow, is that a great moment in the history of “impartial journalism” or what? Oh, we bloggers have so much to learn about objectivity and even-handedness from a “reporter” like Helen Thomas. Yeah, right…..

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