WP "media critic" Howie Kurtz picks on 85-year-old lady: Helen Thomas [View All]

[DeepModem Mom]

Helen's New War
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 13, 2006

Helen Thomas has been out of the objectivity business for some time now, so she's entitled to her opinions.

One of those opinions is a rather low estimation of her journalistic colleagues on the Iraq war.

The Hearst columnist has made clear, at one White House briefing after another, that she fiercely opposes the war. One might wonder whether she should be giving brief antiwar speeches in the form of questions, but again, she's a commentator now, not a UPI reporter.

I gather, though, that her critique of the media's performance in 2002 and 2003 is starting to rub some journalists the wrong way. I don't know anyone in the business who thinks the media did a great job of skeptically reporting on the administration during the runup to the war, even though independent evidence of whether Saddam indeed had WMD was hard to come by. But Thomas, who's got a new book called "Watchdogs of Democracy?", goes much farther.

In an interview with Cox News, Thomas says her book is "just sort of a critique - some might say an attack - on the White House press corps, the Pentagon press corps and so forth for laying down on the job. I feel they gave up their one weapon, which is skepticism, in the run-up to the war. And they had plenty, plenty notice that we were going to war - two years, in fact. . . . I was outraged at what I felt was a deafening silence when the reporters should have been asking, 'You want to go to war? Why? Give us the proof.'"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100587.html

AND HOW LONG HAS HOWIE BEEN "OUT OF THE OBJECTIVITY BUSINESS"???