“Politicians, ugly buildings, and whores all get respectable if
they last long enough,” said John Huston in the movie
Chinatown. To that list we can add White House
correspondents.
For nearly five decades Helen Thomas sat in the briefing
room of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, earning through sheer longevity
the title “dean of the White House press corps.” Her career
finally came to an ignominious end Monday when she made some
comments so offensive that even her friends in the media could
not defend her.
Yet even in disgrace, Thomas was treated as if she was
departing royalty. The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank
called it a “sad end to a storied career” adding, “the White
House press corps will be diminished without her front and
center.” The New York Times’ Jeremy Peters
called her “trailblazing and historic. Few White House
correspondents even achieved her high profile and
respectability.” Even in its statement condemning her the White
House Correspondents Association also called her a
“trailblazer.”
Okay, but what exactly had Thomas done to earn her
trailblazer status? What important stories had she broken? What
great investigative pieces had she done? What corruption had she
exposed?
The stories mentioned above didn’t get into that. That’s
because she didn’t have any such contributions to her credit. She
was and is a hack.
That is to say Thomas is a relic of an earlier age, one
before the advent of 24-hour a day cable and the Internet, when
news agencies needed somebody physically at the White House to
report on it.
Outwardly, the job seemed glamorous. It did ensure that the
reporter’s copy landed on the front page or their stand-ups led
the evening broadcast. In reality, though, it often amounted to
little more than regurgitating White House talking points.
Most reporters would grow bored and move along after a
while. Not Thomas. She spent some 40 years working for the wire
service United Press International dutifully filling out “The
president said today” stories. That is not trailblazing
journalism. It’s hackwork.
As Jonathan Chait noted in a trenchant piece about Thomas
for the New Republic a few years ago: “The
odd thing about her awards and citations is that they almost
never mention any specific contributions she has made to
journalism save for being female and, well, old.”
Those two things were enough. Despite what many people
think, D.C. can be a pretty sentimental place. Individuals can
earn great affection just for hanging around. As early as the
1980s one could read stories in the Washington Post
about how neat it was that somebody like Thomas who had worked
during the Kennedy administration was still on the job during the
Reagan years.
At least she still had a readership in those days. But by
the 1990s UPI went into a steep decline as it was beaten out by
AP and Reuters. By this point few people were actually reading
her stories. Yet as a beloved institution, she retained her
privileged spot in the briefing room.
By 2000, UPI had been sold to the News World
Communications, aka the Moonies. Thomas refused to work for them
and instead began a gig as an opinion columnist for the Hearst
Newspapers. “I censored myself for 50 years…. Now I wake up and
ask myself, ‘Who do I hate today?’” she said in 2002. To no one’s
shock, she came out as a lefty.
It was then during the George W. Bush years that she
achieved the height of her fame. Freed from even a semblance of
impartiality, her queries during press briefings evolved into
rants capped off with rhetorical questions. A sample from
January, 2003: “Why does he want to bomb innocent Iraqis?”
The questions managed to channel the anger of the Left over
the Iraq War. But it was little more than Kabuki theater. Her
questions elicited little in the way of information. (Bush
stubbornly refused to cop to the fact that he just hated innocent
Iraqis.) For a while the administration simply ignored her
out altogether.
Why was she there anyway? Ah yes, she was a columnist. You
can read her columns here.
They include such hard-hitting pieces as “Ms. Obama Focuses on
Healthy Food” and “Obama’s News Conference Shows Accountability
In Action.” Of course, you probably remember them from the times
you discussed them at work or around the dinner table.
I’m joking of course. Hardly anybody read these pieces of
drivel. And for good reason. They are awful. Even taking into
account that Thomas is in her 80s, it is amazing that somebody
could spend a lifetime as a writer and have such a poor grasp of
writing.
Not to mention politics, economics or any other issue. Her
final column was titled, “Save Social Security.” It includes this
gem: “Social Security is not a charity. It is a
trust fund created by contributions paid by workers and their
employers, designed to assure a future livelihood, first for the
elderly, then orphans, then the disabled. It’s a retirement
savings plan — not a handout.”
Err, no. Social Security is a welfare program
that transfers wealth from the young to the old. The trust fund
is a fiction. Saying otherwise is spreading misinformation.
As her comment that the “Jews should get the hell out of
Palestine” showed, she wasn’t much better on foreign policy
either.
In his column the Post’s Dana Milbank noted that
if she had only retired a week ago, she would have ended her
career as one of the most revered reporters in Washington
history. He meant that as praise for Thomas, but it was more of
an indictment of Washington.
