Salon must-read: A 7-page blow-by-blow of the McClellan massacre over Rove

[Bush_Eats_Beef]

This sucker's 7 pages long...there's no WAY that posting four paragraphs here can do it justice. I've posted the first four below. Get a Salon Day Pass and read the whole thing.

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2005/08/27/briefing/index.html

I invaded the White House press corps
I had front row seats at the media's Great Slave Rebellion over Karl Rove. No wonder our democracy's in trouble.

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By Cintra Wilson



CAPTION: "A photo composite of White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan during his daily briefing."

Aug. 27, 2005 | On July 11, the story of Karl Rove's involvement in the Valerie Plame case broke, and the hounds got loose in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House and whomped on the press secretary. It was the Great McClellan Mauling of '05: Thirty-five questions about Karl Rove by a suddenly unified and frothy White House press corps that had quickened into a minor mutiny.

July 11, the Day the Press Corps Attacked, was just the kickoff. I spent the next two weeks in the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House, witnessing the molten Rove-a-thon. By the end I felt like I'd spent a couple of weeks on one of those indoor thrill rides where seats are bolted to a moving floor while a film is shown, creating a vague sensation of G-force when nothing actually goes anywhere. Still, the mini-revolt offered hope that despite its previously persistent vegetative state, the press might not be entirely dead yet. For the first time since 9/11, the reporters got nakedly hostile and went for the throat. Pandora's box opened -- just a hairline crack, but enough bats flew out to suggest that it might not close all the way again.

In the last few years, the press has lost all sense of its own mojo. Things bottomed out after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, when any aggressive grilling of the administration branded reporters as unpatriotic, which potentially alienated their audiences. The high emotion surrounding 9/11 and the War on Terror (or the new, improved Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism, which the Beltway kids snarkily refer to as G-SAVE) have made them very useful hostage babies for the administration cowboys to shield themselves with during shootouts with the press. Somehow, aggressive questioning of the White House got spun as a heretical insult to slaughtered American innocents. It was so demoralizing that after a while the press succumbed en masse to what I call the Potomac dinge: passive cooperation in one's own degradation -- the deranged, unconscious complicity that is found in victims of ritual abuse.

"This is the most complacent and complicit media I've ever seen," Helen Thomas, the most senior member of the White House press corps, told me in an interview at her office at Hearst.

[havocmom]

1. Thanks for the link. Will read the article tomorrow

when I hope to have my brain engaged again.

[shraby]

2. The wisdom of Helen Thomas can't be denied.