I love this woman. If only everyone in the White House Press Corps was as smart and gutsy as Helen.

Note that the question about flirting only encompassed members of the WHPC - I'm sure Helen is well aware the Steven Colbert, among others has flirted with her.

[sigh]

Helen Thomas is unique. She is a journalist.

Thank you, Broadsheet, for this post... else I would have missed it completely, since I don't usually read Elle. (Maybe I should.) I'll look for it when I'm out and about this weekend.

Helen Thomas has more balls, if you'll pardon the metaphor, than all the stuffed shirts (male and female) of Fox News put together. She gets ignored for what, two years? Then when she finally gets called on her first words are, "you'll be sorry" followed by the one question nobody in the Lapdog Corps wants to ask: why are we in Iraq?

I wish we had more of her.

Helen Thomas: That's because I think the term applies to all of us. We all defaulted on the country and the government by not challenging the White House in the run-up to the war. We gave away our only weapon, which is skepticism.

Goldman: Why the rash of, uh, lapdogism?

Thomas: September 11 scared everyone. And I think the reporters knew that the briefings were on television and that people watching might consider them un-American and unpatriotic if they asked tough questions.

I admire Helen Thomas but she's way wrong on this one.

White House journalists gave away their skepticism WAY before Bush came along. I really honestly think the bar on press skepticism got lowered with Clinton drug policy and it ended up low enough for Bush to crawl over and take our whole foreign policy with him.

I remember back when the first DOT study was published that concluded the relative risk index of a person on marijuana (in the absence of other substances) killing someone on the highway was the same as that of a sober driver.

Barry McCaffrey held press conferences where he mangled the conclusions of this study until they were unrecognizable. Made it look like a national epidemic of stoned drivers was slaughtering Americans by the millions.

Every single reporter printed that story exactly as McCaffrey told it and not ONE SINGLE reporter bothered to read the original report to find out what it really said.

And this study was available for free from the DOT for the asking. It's not like they couldn't get a copy. They just didn't bother.

I admire Helen Thomas enormously, but the press was exhibiting lapdog behavior LONG before 9/11 happened.

It would be nice to see some of them admit it some day.

Thanks, Broadsheet, for again bringing to my attention something I'd never had read on my own.

To this former journalist and current patroitic liberal (NOT a contradiction in terms, thank you very much), Helen Thomas is someone I wish we could clone. I wish we could go to all those other news outlets (or former news outlets) and point to Helen and say, "Look you clowns, this is what a real journalist looks like, sounds like, asks questions like--IS."

I do find myself concurring, however, with Patricia Schwarz's comment about the WH press being lapdogs for longer than the Bush administration. I first spotted signs of it in the Reagan years, the dawn of the post-modern spinarama world in which we now live. It seems worst during Republican administrations. They'd tear into Clinton (as their corporate daddies told them to?) and then go back to their "I'm rolling over to show you my belly, please scratch it" mode.

You GO, Helen! You're nobody's lapdog and never have been!

Classy, intelligent, sense of humor, firm in her convictions, what a great lady!

She shows that the "dog" in journalism should be "dogged pursuit of the truth," not "lapdog."

This is how the non-lapdog journalists in Australia treated the stoned driving story:

NO PROOF CANNABIS PUT DRIVERS AT RISK

Studies had found it impossible to prove cannabis adversely affected driving, an Adelaide University researcher said yesterday.

Professor Jack Maclean, director of the road accident research unit, said, while there was no doubt alcohol affected driving adversely, that was not the case with marijuana.

"It has been impossible to prove marijuana affects driving adversely," he told the Australian Driver Fatigue Conference in Sydney.

"There is no doubt marijuana affects performance but it may be it affects it in a favourable way by reducing risk-taking."

http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v01/n1849/a09.html

Nowhere in any American stoned driver story were any of these studies reported accurately.

In each version of the stoned driver story I saw, the reporter carefully explained the White House position that marijuana was a major hazard on American roads, and then the story ended.

Outside of America, journalists managed to report the actual science. Inside of America, the journalists only told their readers and viewers the government's opinion, and treated that as estabished fact.

What happened with Iraq and the press was not in way shocking to people who followed the stoned driver story as it made its way around all the mainstream media outlets.

I guess Helen just ignored this, because who cares about marijuana when you're covering foreign policy?

But this kind of lapdogism has clearly spread to foreign policy now.

Maybe if the press had cared about journalistic lapdogism back when it was confined to drug policy, we'd be in a different place now as a nation.

For example, not in Iraq.