Greetings puny Earthlings.
This past week saw the retirement of Helen Thomas from her place of dishonor in the front row of the Washington Press Corps after she suggested that Israelis give up their 3000+ years of history, hand over their nation to people who enjoy blowing up schools, and return to Europe where 6 million of their number were slaughtered during the 1940s.
Her forced retirement came just months shy of her 90th birthday, and about 25 years too late.
Her entire career was a classic illustration of everything that's wrong with the mainstream media. As I write this many of the media's chattering classes are talking about her great accomplishments as the doyenne of the chattering class.
And here is a list of greatest journalistic accomplishments:
1. She showed up.
2. She stayed.
Yes, she broke the mold by being the first woman to join the White Housedrinking club press corps. But if it wasn't her, it would have been someone else, it was an inevitability, and after breaking that mold, Helen Thomas got moldy very quickly.
For those of you who don't believe me just answer these two questions:
1. What big "scoops" did she dig up in her career?
2. When was the last time you read one of her "columns" and said: "Damn, she's brilliant?"
The answers are 1. None, and 2. Never.
Because you don't get scoops when you're the White House correspondent. All you do is regurgitate what the Press Secretary tells you, and write about what you heard, layering on as much spin as you can get away with.
Reporters like the position because it gives them instant daily national exposure, but realize that it's a very limited position, because you really can't break news the way you can in other positions. So most journalists, the real ones, move on when they've done their turn in order to grow their careers.
Helen Thomas at least had the foresight to know her limitations as just a biased hack, and once she had the "showing up" part done, she stayed, using her gender and age to get away with her hackery, her bias, and her blatant hatred of Jews, Republicans, Israel, democratic countries, and anything else that she disagrees with that manages to poke through the layers of cobwebs in her senility addled brain.
Since she was "The First," had seniority, and expressed openly the prejudices most media mavens had to hide under layers of baffle-gab, she was honored, feted, and glorified waaay beyond her ability, intelligence, or integrity. It helped her get a contract with Hearst newspapers that Hearst instantly regretted, running only a handful of her least incoherent columns, and binning the rest.
Helen Thomas sat in the front seat of that press room like a pimple on the ass of progress. Sore, unpleasant, and full of some really nasty stuff.
Then she finally went too far, ripped off the mask, and showed the world the pseudo intellectual pus that filled her head.
Now she's gone, and the White House is going to have to find another long-in-the-tooth, anti-Semitic, incoherent, yahoo to fill that precious front row seat.
It won't be hard, there are a lot of jokers in the media deck.
Keep watching the skies, because we're watching you.
This past week saw the retirement of Helen Thomas from her place of Her forced retirement came just months shy of her 90th birthday, and about 25 years too late.
Her entire career was a classic illustration of everything that's wrong with the mainstream media. As I write this many of the media's chattering classes are talking about her great accomplishments as the doyenne of the chattering class.
And here is a list of greatest journalistic accomplishments:
1. She showed up.
2. She stayed.
Yes, she broke the mold by being the first woman to join the White House
For those of you who don't believe me just answer these two questions:
1. What big "scoops" did she dig up in her career?
2. When was the last time you read one of her "columns" and said: "Damn, she's brilliant?"
The answers are 1. None, and 2. Never.
Because you don't get scoops when you're the White House correspondent. All you do is regurgitate what the Press Secretary tells you, and write about what you heard, layering on as much spin as you can get away with.
Reporters like the position because it gives them instant daily national exposure, but realize that it's a very limited position, because you really can't break news the way you can in other positions. So most journalists, the real ones, move on when they've done their turn in order to grow their careers.
Helen Thomas at least had the foresight to know her limitations as just a biased hack, and once she had the "showing up" part done, she stayed, using her gender and age to get away with her hackery, her bias, and her blatant hatred of Jews, Republicans, Israel, democratic countries, and anything else that she disagrees with that manages to poke through the layers of cobwebs in her senility addled brain.
Since she was "The First," had seniority, and expressed openly the prejudices most media mavens had to hide under layers of baffle-gab, she was honored, feted, and glorified waaay beyond her ability, intelligence, or integrity. It helped her get a contract with Hearst newspapers that Hearst instantly regretted, running only a handful of her least incoherent columns, and binning the rest.
Helen Thomas sat in the front seat of that press room like a pimple on the ass of progress. Sore, unpleasant, and full of some really nasty stuff.
Then she finally went too far, ripped off the mask, and showed the world the pseudo intellectual pus that filled her head.
Now she's gone, and the White House is going to have to find another long-in-the-tooth, anti-Semitic, incoherent, yahoo to fill that precious front row seat.
It won't be hard, there are a lot of jokers in the media deck.
Keep watching the skies, because we're watching you.
1 comment:
Praise be to whomever!
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