The American Press

[Helen Thomas has been a member of the White House Press Corps since John Kennedy was President]

So the press' perennial nastiness toward Israel ISN'T fair and honest reporting? What a surprise!

7 June 2010 Monday

Yesterday Helen Thomas apologized to some group of rabbis. As though the problem was that she had accidentally mis-spoken and hurt somebody's feelings. What she was apologizing for was for having impulsively let down the mask.

The only thing Helen Thomas is guilty of that the majority of the mainstream press is not also guilty of, is getting caught. She is representative of widespread bigotry in the press. It is this press antisemitism that routinely calls the 'Arab Attack - Israeli Response' cycle Israeli aggression.

It is bigots like Helen Thomas and her less-open antisemitic colleagues in the press both here and abroad that brainwash empty-headed louts like Christy and Damien into believing Arab and leftist antisemitic nonsense.

The reason I so easily demolish Christy's and Damien's arguments is not just that I am a lot smarter than either of them, though I am. It is also because their arguments are mere propaganda constructs learned from the press. They are based on nothing but bigotry and fly in the face of facts and logic. They fall apart when prodded even lightly because they are so flimsy. The only thing that is solid and enduring about their ideas is the underlying racist bigotry they are based on.

The problem for the Jews and for all people with intellectual integrity is that the world is full of hundreds of millions of ignorant louts like Christy and Damien. At the same time, people who read critically and think independently are rare.

And the times when the mask slips for a moment, as just now with Helen Thomas, are also rare.

7 June 2010 Monday
Today, Helen Thomas retired. Forty years too late.

Does one imagine that every day of her reporting and her columnizing were not suffused with her barely-masked antisemitism? And are the rest, those still reporting and columnizing, any different? Most of them differ only in clutching the mask, the pretense of fairness and objectiity, more tightly than Helen Thomas did at the last.

What happened to the crone, quite literally, was that she lost her grip.

Nor is it insignificant that she was summarily forced into retirement by the Hearst News Service which could not tolerate the stink.

It is one thing to retire in triumph after a long career. To be toasted and honored, given honorary degrees, speaking at dinners and commencements, rounding out a long career, now called illustrious.

Instead she goes out despised and avoided, and everything she has ever done is now tainted because it is now revealed what underlay all her journalist scribblings.

She ends not in triumph but disgraced. Let me be among those standing in line to kick her when she is down. Whatever else she may have enjoyed in life, her career, her life, and her memory, all end in disgrace. A disgrace entirely of her own making.

What is most delicious about her fall is the hypocrisy of her colleagues in expressing pretend-horror for her having been caught on camera expressing bigoted views they themselves share. She lived by hypocrisy and falsehood, so now has she died by them.