Why Helen Thomas had to retire

posted at 2:39 pm on June 7, 2010 by Karl
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The easy answer is that the firestorm over her comment that the Jews should leave “Palestine” and go back to Germany and Poland was not going to go away. As late as Sunday, the establishment press was still trying to sweep the story under the carpet, with milquetoast statements from Hearst Newspapers, White House Correspondents’ Association President Ed Chen, ABC News’ Ann Compton, and particularly former Clinton flack Joe Lockhart. But the nag was already out of the barn.

After all, the Obama administration was already trying to mend fences with Jewish groups in America, and — in the fallout of the IDF raid on the Gaza flotilla — was backing Israel, because it clings to the illusion of a “peace process” and thus cannot isolate Israel. That environment, combined with the fact that White House press flack Robert Gibbs has a track record of criticizing punditry he doesn’t like, made an official denouncement likely. Thomas knew this, which is why she cowardly avoided showing up to the White House today. And if she did not know this, she likely got a heads-up about the WHCA turning against her.

Why the change from the WHCA? Maybe they figured out the White House would be weighing in. Or maybe they worried that someone from outside the establishment media, e.g., James O’Keefe III or some producer for the O’Reilly Factor, might ambush them with the Lanny Davis question: “Would you be giving a seat in the White House press room — let alone a seat of honor — to someone ranting about sending Blacks back to Africa?” It is one thing to try to turn a blind eye to Helen Thomas; it is quite another to be sucked into her vortex.

Jonah Goldberg’s cynical take implictly raised what ought to be the real question, which is why Thomas was tolerated — and honored — by the White House press for so long as she was:

Everyone knows she is a nasty piece of work and has been a nasty piece of work for decades.

And when I say a nasty piece of work, I don’t simply mean her opinions on Israel. She’s been full-spectrum awful. I’ve known a few people who knew her 40 years ago, and she was slimy then too. ***

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Also, let’s just get the liberal bias thing out of the way. If there was a right-winger who’d spouted so much bile, hate, and ideological agenda-driven nonsense in the White House briefing room for half a century it would be . . . oh wait, no such person would have ever been allowed to become a Washington “institution” in the first place. According to the media graybeards, it’s always been a sign of seriousness and unwavering truth-seeking for reporters to attack from the left (c.f. Dan Rather, Daniel Schorr, et al.).

See? She’s not biased she asks Obama and Clinton tough questions too! Yes, from the hard, loony left.

Helen Thomas was humored and honored by the establishment media because she was its institutional id. More often than not, Thomas said the the things they wanted to say, the way they would have liked to say them, were they not (ineffectively) pretending to be objective.

The Helen Thomas story thus serves as a timely rebuke to those in the chattering classes who spent the past few months arguing that the Right had a serious problem with ideological cocooning (or “epistemic closure”) and needed to engage more with the establishment Narrative if it was going be worthy to govern in the future. The critics always dismissed the bias of the establishment press as a type of tu quoque or as a phenomenon separable from groupthink on the Right. The reality is that the people most in charge of the establishment Narrative in America — ensconced in a cocoon of their own — tolerated and feted Thomas for decades. They would be doing it still, if not for that meddling blogosphere. However, unlike Dave Weigel, I do not see it as a victory for conservatives so much as it is a defeat for a raving, anti-Semitic moonbat and her enablers.

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