Howard Kurtz still doesn’t get the “conservative backlash building against the New York Times for
publishing that piece about the administration’s secret access to
banking records in terror investigations.”
In all the defending of the Times, I was reminded of a segment I heard
a couple weeks ago on the Diane Rehm show. Here guests were David
Gregory of NBC News, Jim Angle of Fox News and Trudi Rubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Rubin was reflexively antagonistic toward the
administration, but Gregory try to play the middle. Among the
statements he made, however, were the following:
It?s the responsibility of the media, and I cover the president day in and day out, to ask tough questions of our policies, particularly in wartime when there are Americans being killed in the name of that war. I think a lot of people mistake political views when it?s skepticism when it?s a desire to challenge the administration on these policies. I think it?s justified to do so.
After going through this haughty defense of the press’s attack on
the administration, Gregory later suggested that the press was there to
provide the other side of the story. That would be fine if all
Americans were in the White House press corps and heard the president’s
side of the story “day in and day out,” but we’re not and we rely on
them not “to challenge the administration,” but to report.
