You know White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel is pulling another fast one when he gets that “gotcha” grin that was on full, leering display Tuesday during President Obama’s first-ever televised daytime news conference.
The grin came as Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney was recognized by the chief executive for a question supposedly submitted by somebody in Iran. Obama knew to call on Pitney, who is not a White House press corp regular, because presidential news managers had arranged for him to be there and to ask such a question.
As Dana Milbank of The Washington Post described it, “reporters looked at one another in amazement at the stagecraft they were witnessing. White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel grinned at the surprised TV correspondents in the first row.”
Pitney was not the only White House plant. As Milbank points out, Macarena Vidal of the Spanish-language EFE news agency was also purposely recognized by Obama in order to answer a question on a pre-arranged topic.
So why didn’t the world’s most visible public policy inquisitors get up and walk out instead of meekly sitting there quietly steaming, but allowing Obama and Emanuel to continue converting what is supposed to be a totally spontaneous series of no-holds-barred questions into the sort of presser Hugh Chavez can only dream about?
With a few exceptions – I bow deeply here to the Examiner’s Julie Mason, Fox News’ Major Garrett and a handful of other still-independent journos covering the president – too many of these people are in the tank for Obama.
If they were covering sports instead of the White House, we would call them “Homers.” Those are the writers covering the home-town teams who can’t bring themselves to write a critical line about the local stars for fear of losing their locker-room access.
This isn’t a matter of conservative versus liberal or the saintly Dan Rather staring down the evil Richard Nixon. It’s about journalists forsaking their constitutionally mandated role of second-guessing government officials, no matter which political party happens to be in power.
How will we know when the rest of the White House press corp have recovered their courage? When they start routinely asking Obama and spokesman Robert Gibbs questions like these:
á Mr. President, you said during your campaign last year that you would sign no bill before the public had at least five days to examiner it, but, beginning with your $787 billion stimulus bill and continuing with every major bill passed by Congress since then, you’ve violated your own promise. Why?
á Mr. President, gas prices are steadily moving higher now as Congress prepares to approve the Waxman-Markey version of your “cap-and-trade” anti-global warming energy bill. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that this bill will impose nearly a trillion dollars in new, indirect taxes on all Americans. Is that what you had in mind during the campaign when you said you preferred that energy prices go up “more gradually”?
á Mr. President, you said repeatedly during your campaign last year that your health care reform plan would allow all Americans to keep their private health insurance if they chose to do so, yet this past week, your aides said that promise was not to be “taken literally.” Can you tell us which of your other campaign promises were also not meant to be taken literally?
This problem of a supine media is not limited to the White House press corp. Witness the propaganda presented Sunday by The New York Times as a scientific poll in which a majority of Americans allegedly professed support for higher taxes in return for Obama’s nationalized health care.
Of course, the Times’ editors didn’t bother to tell their readers that the survey respondents included twice as many Obama voters as McCain supporters, rendering the sample utterly meaningless as a credible indicator of public opinion on the issue.
And there’s ABC’s giving the White House a full hour of prime-time broadcasting to make its case for nationalizing one-fifth of the U.S. economy via Obama’s health care proposal. Some of Obama’s critics were included in the studio audience but only after ABC announced the program and received substantial flak for allowing itself to be so transparently used by the White House.
The latest data shows ABC evening news – like its broadcast rivals at CBS and NBC – has its smallest audience ever. Coincidental?
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
