Helen Thomas's colleagues let her down by not reining her in

All this might have been avoided had Helen’s friends gently suggested it was time to retire. But here the insular nature of Beltway life clearly came into play. Those who were accustomed to seeing Thomas around town regarded her as one of Washington’s harmless gadflies, perhaps forgetting that she still had access to a powerful megaphone.

There were exceptions — Slate’s Jack Shafer and the New Republic’s Jonathan Chait have noted that Thomas was asking “wildly inappropriate” questions, as Chait put it, but the story line got no traction, even when the late White House spokesman Tony Snow accused her of offering “the Hezbollah view.”…

As with Brinkley, no one can take away Thomas’s trailblazing career, but those decades in the spotlight also imposed a responsibility to meet certain minimal standards. Why wasn’t she reined in earlier? For the same reason I’ve been tempted to pull a couple of punches in writing this: Who wants to beat up on an octogenarian lady? But a little tough love might have spared her this final blot on her legacy.