Parnes’s fawning coverage of the first lady has inspired Betsy Rothstein of FishbowlDC.com to launch a “Parnes-o-Meter,” which ranks Parnes’s pieces about Michelle Obama on a scale of 1 to 10 kisses. “People have asked me, over and over again, for the past three weeks, ‘Why do you hate Amie Parnes? Why do you have such a personal thing against her?’” Rothstein told The Daily Caller. “The fact is that I’ve never met her. I don’t know her and this isn’t personal. It’s totally professional. I’ve watched her work, I’ve read her work, day in and day out, and there is never anything, not even slightly, critical of the first lady. It’s absurd coverage. As a media reporter, I don’t know how I couldn’t point that out.”…

In the same piece, Parnes holds up Michelle Malkin as an especially virulent – and by implication, unreasonable – critic of the president’s wife. “In a column, Michelle Malkin also chimed in, saying that the first lady and her ‘food cops’ aren’t ‘interested in slimming down kids’ waistlines but rather ‘boosting government and public union payrolls,’” Parnes wrote.

Yet according to Malkin, Parnes never bothered to contact her directly, though “she had plenty of time to quote sympathetic academics who lend an air of supposed gravitas to the piece.”