Let’s hope Michelle Obama is keeping a scrapbook of all the gushy positive stories written for her by Washington Post reporter Krissah Thompson. In Friday’s Post, the Style section front page carried a foot-high picture of the First Lady in a black robe and the all-caps headline “MICHELLE OBAMA COMMENCES TELLING IT AS SHE SEES IT.”
All around the picture were little yellow quote bubbles of her most inspirational quotations from her commencement speeches with “unusual candor” on race and class.
It may seem hard for the average person to have sympathy for a politician who wields her power to unconstitutionally silence her opposition but that is exactly what Washington Post writer Krissah Thompson tried to summon in her puff piece on Houston mayor and budding totalitarian Annise Parker in the March 18th paper.
Back in October, the media was silent as openly lesbian Parker attempted to tried to stop churches and pastors who were speaking out on one of her pet pieces of legislation-- a transgender rights bathroom bill called “HERO.” HERO --The Houston Equal Rights Ordinance -- would allow people who identified as transgender to choose whichever public bathroom they wanted to enter. At least 5 local pastors gathered signatures to try to repeal the impending bill, but Parker ordered City attorney David Feldman to throw out the signatures so they couldn’t appear on the ballot. She also issued subpoenas, demanding the pastors submit their sermons to the city government to monitor when/if they mentioned the bathroom bill.
As proof the national media is trying to turn Ferguson into Selma – with no appreciation of a difference in racism between Alabama in the 1960s and St. Louis in 2014 – see Krissah Thompson’s Thanksgiving Day dissertation in The Washington Post. A headline was “To many, ‘Ferguson’ is shorthand for police mistreatment of blacks.”
It’s been nearly a week but it seems that someone in the press finally noticed the lack of American media traveling with Mrs. Obama across China. The Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson, who just yesterday gushed over the first lady’s trip, finally acknowledged in a March 26 piece that American media were shut out from the first lady's press pool.
Despite Thompson’s admission, the Post buried the details on A7 with the awkward title that “In China, first lady lauds free press amid questions about access.” The Post reported recognized that “coverage of the trip has been made more difficult by tight restrictions on reporters and photographers, who have been kept far away from many events and were not allowed to accompany the first lady, her mother and her two daughters on their flight last week from the United States.”
First Lady Michelle Obama is wrapping up her tour of China sans the American press. Despite American media being shut out from the visit, Mrs. Obama has received glowing coverage of her trip, most recently from The Washington Post’s Krissah Thompson.
Writing on Tuesday’s March 25, Thompson puffed up “History and jump-rope as first lady visits Xi’an” before providing a glowing description of Mrs. Obama’s “five-hour sightseeing tour, giving her and her family a view of China’s long history- plus a little jump-roping on the side.”
Surprise! The Washington Post on Wednesday profiled two young female pro-life activists on the front of the Style section. Not a surprise? The headline: “Antiabortion forces’ rising young stars.” Reporter Krissah Thompson wrote “Kristan Hawkins, 28, and Lila Rose, 25, are central players in the antiabortion movement’s resurgence.”
In the same corner of the front page yesterday, the Post oozed all over Gloria Steinem without a single opposing word. (Or consider past 100-percent goo for Planned Parenthood boss Cecile Richards.) The profile on Hawkins and Rose was heavily dosed with abortion advocates denouncing them as unethical or extreme.
Monday’s Style section of the Washington Post is stuck on its Glorify Liberals setting. At the top it reads, “Forty years after founding the Children’s Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman is unbending on aiding the youngest." The large headline below is “A soldier stands her ground.”
Edelman and CDF are holding a biggest Kennedy Center fundraising event honoring Hillary Clinton, although that information is buried in the middle. Post reporter-glorifier Krissah Thompson is at it again, painting Edelman as the righteous advocate who scolds conservatives who apparently want to starve poor children:
While The Washington Post wrote about reporters revolving into the Obama administration, the more common pattern is reporters who flatter, pander, and powder the Obamas in the “news” pages. Krissah Thompson should be on Michelle Obama’s payroll. Splashed all over the front of Style today is this concept: “Rest up. You’re going to need extra energy to even read about all the places that the first lady has gone to get to know D.C.”
Following the all-caps headline “MICHELLE OBAMA’S WASHINGTON" and a huge graphic of eight images of Mrs. Obama in her many activities, the Post story went on for two entire pages. Thompson began the smoochy prose from the top:
In today's 16-paragraph page A6 story, "Legal challenges tie up new voting restrictions,"* the Washington Post's Krissah Thompson reported that many "[s]tricter ID laws and other controversial voting restrictions" could be held up in the courts until after November election.
At no point in her story, however, did Thompson note recent polling shows 70 percent of Americans back photo ID for voting. What's more, while Thompson noted Obama/Holder Justice Department staffers are working to thwart "an effort by Florida's Republican secretary of state to remove noncitizens from voter registration lists, saying it is illegal to conduct such a purge this close to an election," she failed to note that in this instance, it may well be the Obama administration that is violating federal law by refusing to assist Florida officials.
Michelle Obama is out with a new book about the White House vegetable garden and Krissah Thompson of the Washington Post is doing her level best playing book publicist.
"One of Michelle Obama's early worries about life in the White House had to do with a plot of land," Thompson gushed in the lead paragraph of today's page A4 story. "[T]he first lady found herself fretting over whether her much-hyped garden would grow," Thompson added, going on to quote a passage from Mrs. Obama's new book:
The front page of The Washington Post carried a story Tuesday on black liberals demanding all blacks stand with President Obama -- just because he's black. Krissah Thompson's story carried some noteworthy "get in line" quotes from the forget-the-black-unemployment-numbers crowd, but the closest thing to a moderate or conservative in the article is a man suggesting Obama is not God.
On the front page, Thompson quoted from radio host Tom Joyner on his BlackAmericaWeb.com blog. “Let’s not even deal with the facts right now. Let’s deal with just our blackness and pride — and loyalty. We have the chance to re-elect the first African-American president, and that’s what we ought to be doing. And I’m not afraid or ashamed to say that as black people, we should do it because he’s a black man.”
Anyone reading the Anita Hill puff piece in Friday's Washington Post could see reporter Krissah Thompson was a big Anita Hill fan. But did she also have to be a lazy, handout-accepting Anita Hill fan? The only conservative skepticism toward Hill that the Post allowed were five words from Justice Clarence Thomas's memoir. But they were misquotes.
I have an autographed copy of the book from a Heritage Foundation dinner with the Thomases, and could not find the quotes Thompson used...until I found a New York Times op-ed by Anita Hill from October 2, 2007 -- in the week the Thomas book came out. It was called "The Smear This Time," and Hill misquoted the book. So did Krissah Thompson, copying Hill's misquotes...word for word.