Posted by lauraflanders at 2:33 pm
June 8, 2010

Helen Thomas was Wrong — But You’d Think She’d Killed 9 People or Destroyed Our Coastline

So who says Obama can’t show anger? Helen Thomas sure made him angry.

After video hit YouTube of eighty-nine year old reporter, Helen Thomas, telling an interviewer that Israelis should “get out of Palestine” and go back to Poland and Germany and other places, the white House issued an immediate condemnation. Reprehensible was their word. In the ritual flagellation that’s followed, one can’t help thinking that the grande dame of the White House press corps would have gotten less grief if she’d purposely cheated the financial system and took taxpayer money to recover, or killed eleven and destroyed an ecosystem in an avoidable deep water drilling disaster, or let 29 men die in a push for more mining profits. Or shot nine men dead — in the head — in international waters.

Thomas’s comments were regrettable, and she’s regretted them and she has resigned her post with Hearst because of them. Which is more than can be said of most pundits who say hateful things in the money media.

The White House Correspondents Association showed more fury in 24 hours towards Thomas than they’ve ever shown towards the journos who, unlike Thomas, softballed Bush for eight straight years and passed on government lies that lead us into the Iraq invasion. Sometimes one’s strengths are also one’s weaknesses. Thomas was — and remains — a bulldog. She doggedly questioned President Bush about war and torture at a time when the rest of the press rolled over. In return they appear more shocked by a comment — albeit laced with 70 years of horrific history, it’s true — than they are by the deaths of flesh-and-blood humans.

Thomas’s crime wasn’t just antisemitism — it was antisemitism in defense of Palestine. That’s the true source of the outrage. The outrage that Obama and Biden and most other U.S. officials, to say nothing of the majority of the press corps, can’t seem to find for others.

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Laura is a long-time journalist, author and media activist. She wrote the New York Times bestseller Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species and Blue Grit: Making Impossible, Improbable, and Inspirational Political Change in America. Before founding GRITtv, she started up and hosted “Your Call” on public radio KALW in San Francisco and RadioNation on Air America Radio. She is also a regular contributor to The Nation magazine and the Huffington Post. Flanders was founding director of the Women’s Desk at the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) and for more than 10 years she produced and hosted CounterSpin, FAIR’s nationally-syndicated radio program. Laura is a regular commentator on MSNBC’s The Ed Show where she has become the go-to source for reliable, progressive analysis of the day’s top stories. The Institute for Alternative Journalism named her one of ten “Media Heroes” of 1994 and she was recently awarded a NY Moves “Power Woman of the Year.”