Helen Thomas: Journalists are Now ’Soul Searching’ After ’Playing Dead’ Since 9/11

Helen Thomas, arguably the nation’s best known print journalist and dean of the White House press corps, told a Falls Church audience last week that “there is a lot of soul searching going on now” among news professionals about uncritical coverage since 9/11 of the Bush administration and its policies.

“The press has rolled over and played dead,” Thomas said of its behavior in recent years. “Our main weapon is skepticism. It is our indispensable role to protect the people’s right to know,” she said. But it failed to live up to that role in recent years.

Thomas, speaking to the monthly breakfast of the Democratic Business Council of Northern Virginia, said that in the wake of 9/11 “reporters pulled in their horns. It was felt that tough questions of the president were un-American, and this continued as the administration segued from 9/11 into Iraq.”

“Every single day,” she said, “We heard 9/11 linked with Saddam Hussein by the administration. Reporters were scared to rock the boat. But everyone in the White House press room knew this president wanted to go to war.”

As for Congress, it too has cowed by the “fear card,” she said. Opposing the president’s desire to invade Iraq was construed as unpatriotic.

“Only now is the press starting to come out of its coma,” she said, noting that “Katrina helped out. It turned reporters loose.”

“But we still are not asking the big question about Iraq,” she added, “Which is ‘why?,” why did we invade if there were no weapons of mass destruction, if there was no link of Saddam Hussein to al Qaeda.”

She noted that former Bush cabinet member Paul O’Neill, in his book, reported that the invasion of Iraq was discussed in the very cabinet meeting of the Bush administration in January 2001. The added that in Bob Woodward’s book, “Plan of Attack,” Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said the day after 9/11, “Let’s bomb Iraq.”

“Why not demand a real explanation from the president on why he invaded Iraq?” she reiterated. She offered her own theory, that the invasion reflected the wishes of a tight circle in the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) obsessed with a “lust for empire” in the Middle East that would eventually extend the invasion of Iraq to Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and Egypt.

Thomas, who remains active as a member of the White House press corps, writes a weekly column (carried in the Falls Church News-Press), and peppers the presidential press spokesman with questions, such as “why,” on a daily basis at press briefings, said that Scott McClellan, the president’s spokesman, always operates from a very tight script and never deviates.

“He has a one-dimensional approach to his job,” she said. “Rather than seeing his role as the only transmission belt of information about the president and his policies to the American people, he sees himself only as an advocate for the president.”

She noted that when the faux journalist on a pro-Republican payroll, Jeff Guckert (aka Jeff Gannon) was attending press briefings, McClellan would offer him the opportunity to ask a question whenever he felt the need to duck pressure from another journalist.

This behavior marked a significant departure from earlier administrations that Thomas has covered, every one dating back to John F. Kennedy, Jr.

It gets even worse with rare formal presidential press conferences, she added. President Bush carefully selects the journalists he will allow to ask questions and then does not allow for follow-ups.

She characterized Bush as “a momma’s boy without rapport with his dad who feels comfortable around strong women. He’s fond of using the words ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty,’ but he doesn’t know what they are, because he’s sure clamped down on ours.”

“The U.S. has lost its way under the present leadership,” she said. “This war has shamed us. Are we advocates for torture now? The vice president insists on vetoing a bill unless it has a prohibition against the torture of POWs removed. Surely this is not us. Then there is the prescription drug policy, doing the bidding of the pharmaceutical companies, and this administration’s contempt for blue collar voters, opposing a $1 increase in the $5.15 minimum wage and wiping out overtime and OSHA protections. We’re despised all over the world for what we’ve done in recent years.”

She said that she looks for her fellow journalists to “live up to their responsibility to truth and accuracy, and their role to hold public officials accountable.” She said democracy is defined as that wherein it is safe to be a minority, where, quoting JFK, she said, “The weak are secure and the strong are just.”

“Democracy dies behind closed doors,” she added, recalling the words of a rabbi who was a survivor of the holocaust. “The greatest sin of the Nazi era,” the rabbi said, “was silence.”

http://www.fcnp.com/540/thomasnews.htm