Athenae, So Called Liberal Media

Margaret Sullivan Did Not Come to Play with You Hos

Press hos, specifically: 

With this uplifting example, I inaugurate an occasional feature: Access Watch, tracking the special treatment — phone calls, interviews, perhaps the lone press seat on the secretary of state’s plane — that can result when media people play nice.

True, it is not the proper job of journalists to provide favorable coverage but rather to hold powerful figures accountable.

But that doesn’t get you far these days, at least in terms of access.

So we’ll be taking note of what does.

I wanted to pull this bit out, because it’s telling:

Marantz quotes a more veteran journalist about the newcomers: “At best, they don’t know what they’re doing. At worst, you wonder whether someone is actually feeding them softball questions.”

Really? You wonder if someone is feeding them softball questions? Like what, something like this? 

Mr. President, as the nation is at odds over war, with many organizations like the Congressional Black Caucus pushing for continued diplomacy through the U.N., how is your faith guiding you? And what should you tell America? Well, what should America do collectively as you instructed before 9/11? Should it be pray?

Mr. President, how is your faith guiding you to attack Iraq and how can Americans be your prayer warriors? What parts of the Bible are you reading to guide your decisions about bombing Baghdad and is there a Psalm you’d recommend we keep in mind to ease our thoughts of murdered children?

Jesus shit, nobody has to feed these people softball questions. Their natural inclination in good times is to spend the day complaining that some blogger has their favorite chair, and this year they’re mostly pissed because the correspondents’ dinner won’t be fun anymore. They’d rather be covering something NORMAL, and this is all just such a damn bummer, man, with the unhinged fascism.

They gasp when someone has the nerve to ask the president what every single one of us is thinking, which is “… dude, the fuck?”

I watched video of that moment and she could not have been more polite in asking why America was suddenly a xenophobic trash fire in public and if extortion was really the way we wanted to go with NATO, and the gasps were audible.

But sure, the real danger is that somebody is giving Breitbart a heads-up about which Fox chyron pissed the president off this morning.

A.