<http://voices.washingtonpost.com/postpartisan/2010/06/we_made_too_many_excuses_for_h.html
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We made too many excuses for Helen Thomas
As someone who has benefited from the trails blazed by Helen Thomas, I am told I should cut her some slack regarding her ignorant remarks about Jews. After all, her successful career -- overcoming now unimaginable sexism -- helped make my career, and those of countless other women journalists, possible. Besides that, she is 89, apologized for her hateful words and, no doubt pressured, announced her immediate retirement. That should be the end of the matter. But I still find myself seething over the incident, and much of my anger comes from being part of a profession that was too willing to give a break to someone who -- no matter how storied a career -- dishonors our work.
Thomas’s comments -- Jews should “get the hell out of Palestine” and return to Poland and Germany, lands that tried to exterminate them -- went largely unnoticed in the mainstream media until it was picked up by the Drudge Report and Montgomery County’s Walt Whitman High School asked her to bow out as this week’s commencement speaker. Various rationalizations were offered up for the lack of coverage: she doesn’t hold public office; the press shouldn’t be policing First Amendment rights of opinion writers; her views on Israel were long known; and, finally, no one really takes her seriously any more.
What is far more likely is that the news media, with rare exceptions, are loath to subject their own to the scrutiny we routinely apply to others. Imagine, if you can, if those same comments had been made by a sitting governor, head of Fortune 500 company or even some Hollywood star.
Helen Thomas was held out as the dean of the White House press corps and accorded special privileges. Like it or not, she was part of our public face. Many thought it cute that the president honored her with cupcakes. And they cheered her brazen questions at White House press conferences. I, for one, cringed at what I considered her increasingly inappropriate behavior. It is one thing to ask a hard-hitting question to elicit real information and an entirely separate matter to grandstand for attention. Thomas long ago crossed a line and she finally ended up paying the price. It’s a sad end to her life’s work, but even sadder is how the rest of the media were willing to go along for the ride.