On Tuesday, some numbskull in the White House press department gave a credential to Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher, who proceeded to disprove the axiom that there are no dumb questions.
Pushing Obamacare and ripping Republicans like a good media plant, Christopher relied on his history of heart attacks to promote the president’s agenda in his question to press secretary Jay Carney:
Talk about your government shutdown. Conservatives would have enjoyed watching liberal TV reporters sputter if President Bush had completely skipped the first row of reporters and picked only friendly reporters, even writers for conservative blog sites. But the media elites would have thrown a major tantrum about censorship -- including Jay Carney in his tenure at Time magazine.
Put the shoe on the other foot, and the liberal media is pretty quiet. President Obama failed to call on TV reporters at his Wednesday press conference, even though he came to The Huffington Post for a shoe-shine question. Then Tommy Christopher at Mediaite pointed out White House press briefer Jay Carney aggressively ignored Ed Henry of Fox News twice at Friday’s briefing, so he walked out:
Just hours before the Senate voted to approve a measure that was passed by the House on Wednesday in a 425-0 vote to restore the death benefits paid to the families of fallen soldiers, liberal radio talk show host Bill Press showed his true colors when he said it would be a “big mistake” for the government to do that because “once the government starts making special exceptions, it allows the shutdown to continue.”
In a stumble similar to one Senate majority leader Harry Reid made last week, when the Nevada Democrat accused CNN reporter Dana Bash of being “irresponsible” and “reckless” for asking if he would help “one child who has cancer” and is receiving treatment through the NIH, Press stated: “When you shut down the government, a lot of great things are not going to get done, and why should we make an exception for those that just happen to pop up and get a lot of media attention?”
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer smells a rat concerning the current negotiations over the government shutdown and the debt ceiling.
Appearing on Fox News’s Special Report, Krauthammer said, “I suspect a bait and switch here on the part of the Obama administration.”
One of the things many conservatives admire about CNN's Jake Tapper is his willingness to speak truths typically too inconvenient for most in his industry.
During an "Ask Me Anything" discussion on Reddit Wednesday, Tapper not only acknowledged the existence of media bias, he also said "White House press briefings are quite often useless":
Evidence of testiness on the Democratic side of the 17% government shutdown continues to accumulate.
Today, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney had a tense exchange with ABC's Jonathan Karl, who was apparently so taken aback by Carney's answer to another reporter that he interjected himself into the dialog — to correct Carney about what House Speaker John Boehner said earlier today about his openness to negotiating. Carney also announced that Americans won't have to wait to see how the nation's healthcare delivery system changes in 2014 to experience long times spent in waiting rooms (Patience, please; it will become clear later in the post). But first, let's get the Blaze's rundown of the Carney-Karl exchange (bolds are mine):
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During his Monday briefing with reporters in the White House, press secretary Jay Carney was asked several times how president Barack Obama would respond to a partial government shutdown. The most interesting query came from Cable News Network's senior White House correspondent Jim Costa, who asked if the Democrats have been using heightened rhetoric to attack Republicans and “trying to taunt” the GOP into doing a shutdown.
“In the last couple of weeks, Democrats including the president have -- and he has not used all these words but I’ll throw out some of them -- have referred to Republicans as arsonists, anarchists, extortionists, blackmailers, hostage takers,” Acosta noted. Even Dan Pfeiffer, assistant to the president and senior advisor to the president for strategy and communications, “talked about bombs being strapped to chests.”
White House press secretary Jay Carney appeared on MSNBC’s Morning Joe Tuesday expressing the typical doom and gloom about what the government shutdown means to Americans and the economy.
After he was done, CNBC’s Michelle Caruso-Cabrera told the MJ crew about how the markets were shrugging off the shutdown due to its likely limited impact on the economy and punctuated her thoughts by saying, “Jay Carney’s been fear mongering on your network” (video follows with transcript and commentary):
Washington Post reporters Paul Farhi and Billy Kenber caused a morning cereal spew inside the Beltway. In a story about the revolving door between reporters and Team Obama, there was this unintentional laugh line from Jay Carney: “But I think any reading of my coverage as a reporter would show that I was not an ideologue. [Time columnist] Joe Klein said he thought I was a Republican” when Carney joined Biden’s staff.
See my dossier on how Carney found Hillary was “strangely mesmerizing" as “the polite but passionate American citizen,” or how Bill Clinton was “probably the best white politician out there speaking on race issues.” (That sounds exactly like Joe Klein.) The Posties quoted Rush Limbaugh decrying the obvious media-Obama mindmeld, then lamely tried to argue their way out of that reality:
When on today's Morning Joe, Obama spokesman Jay Carney had the chutzpah to call the IRS mess a "phony scandal,"Joe Scarborough ripped into him, calling Carney out for using "talking points," instructing him to "answer my question" and informing Carney that "I'm not somebody you talk down to from your podium." Ouch! H/t NB reader cobokat.
Scarborough reminded Carney that he hadn't told the truth when he initially claimed that the scandal was limited to low-level employees in the IRS Cincinnati office, that it now appears that it may go at least as high as the IRS Chief Counsel, appointed by President Obama, is involved. Carney continued to slough off the scandal, claiming it was a diversion and that the President wants to focus on the economy, blah, blah, blah. Things got heated, as you'll see from the video, after the jump.
The main function of a White House press secretary is to distribute information for the administration, which often requires answering difficult questions. Apparently, no one knows this better than Jay Carney, the current spokesman for President Obama.
According to a study by Yahoo News -- which is by no means a conservative outlet -- Carney has dodged answering reporters' questions 9,486 times in the 444 briefings he's held since his first press conference on Feb. 16, 2011, by using 13 different methods, ranging from saying “I don't have the answer … ” 1,905 times to “The president won't tell me … ” on 117 occasions.
Here's an interesting example of your tax dollars at work: Gwen Ifill, a newscaster for the Public Broadcasting System, uses her television programs to staunchly defend Eric Holder, the scandal-ridden U.S. attorney general, and the Internal Revenue System, which has been accused of targeting conservative organizations that apply for a tax-exempt status.
Not content with using her roles as managing editor and moderator of the “Washington Week” program and as a senior correspondent for the “PBS NewsHour,” Ifill took her crusade online on Sunday, when she posted on Twitter that it's “Fun to see the same (named & unnamed) folks calling for Holder resignation who always have” and asserted that “people don't want to know the details back and forth” of the IRS targeting.