In a press roundtable at the National Press Club tonight, White House Press Secretary Tony Snow led a discussion with White House correspondents about the impact of the internet on their respective jobs. Their conclusion? They don’t like being challenged by blogs.
NBC News’ David Gregory bemoaned how political coverage has “become so polarized in this country…because it’s the internet and the blogs that have really used this White House press conferences to somehow support positions out in America, political views.” Tony Snow admitted he sometimes reads blogs (”I’ll occasionally punch it up”) only to find “wonderful, imaginative hateful stuff that comes flying out.”
Newsweek’s White House correspondent Richard Wolffe added, “[Bloggers] want us to play a role that isn’t really our role. Our role is to ask questions and get information. … It’s not a chance for the opposition to take on the government and grill them to a point where they throw their hands up and surrender.”
BadTux the Snarky Penguin retorts:
We call on you reporters to do your job, we call on you to dig through all the piles of reeking flying monkey shit raining down on our head and report the truth buried underneath all the lies and deceptions and misleading statements, and you stamp your little footies and throw down your little journalistic shovels like munchkins going on strike and whine "Not my job!" at the top of your pathetic little voices. And it's we BLOGGERS who are out of line? DO YOUR FUCKING JOB AND THEN WE WON'T PISS ON YOU. Got it?
We bloggers already have full-time jobs making widgets or otherwise doing shit that makes the country's economy work. We don't have the resources of multi-billion-dollar corporations behind us. We don't have a team of researchers to dig up all the facts regarding a particular issue. Yet WE ARE MORE OFTEN RIGHT THAN YOU ARE because we do the job you refuse to do. We were right about Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. We were right about the lack of a Saddam-al Qaeda connection. We were right about the disaster that would be the Iraq occupation. We were right when we predicted civil war in Iraq. We were right, and we were right because we spent fucking HOURS AND HOURS of our own precious time away from our families and cats and livelihoods doing your fucking job for you and looking up the goddamned FACTS. The facts that you piss-poor excuses for "reporters" were too fucking stupid, lazy, or just plain bought to look up for yourself, instead just acting as stenographers for whatever vile political bullshit was being spewed by the goddamned Ministry of Truth as if it were God's own manna from the heavens instead of just a pile of reeking flying monkey shit.
Exactly. Thank you BadTux. I tried, but really could not say it better.
Update: Glenn Greenwald:
There is, literally, a complete absence of a single negative or even balancing comment. It is three Newsweek pages pulsating with pure, tongue-wagging, unadulterated praise, all based on Bush-loyal sources. But the only ones who could possibly find that objectionable are the partisan, idiotic bloggers who do not understand the lofty function of journalism [although an intern at Salon, several months after publication of the Wolffe homage, documented that actual reporters had discovered just how false were the glorifying depictions of Bush fed to (and then obligingly spewed out by) Wolffe].
It is also worth noting in passing the depravity of Tony Snow's complaints (endorsed by the agreeable panel) about the "hateful stuff" that allegedly spews forth from blogs. Contrast Snow's complaint with that Beacon of Civility whom Snow and other administration officials have chosen as their personal interviewer. But it would be entirely unreasonable to expect any of the Senior White House Correspondents on the friendly panel to have mentioned that because their role is simply to ask questions, not to be "political" or to "grill" the administration.
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