Media

Washington (CNSNews.com) – The fallout from Helen Thomas’ controversial comments about Israel and Jews, which led to her immediate retirement on Monday, has prompted journalists covering the White House to re-evaluate the role of an opinion columnist in the White House press corps.

Thomas, 89, the so-called dean of the White House press corps, covered the White House as a news reporter for United Press International (UPI), beginning with the Kennedy administration in the early 1960s. In 2000, she left UPI to become an opinion columnist for Hearst Newspapers. She has a front row seat at the White House press gallery with her name on it...

The fallout over veteran White House reporter Helen Thomas' controversial comments about Jews continued to build as a Washington-area high school abruptly canceled a graduation speech she was scheduled to deliver. The cancelation came after the speaking agency that represents Thomas dropped her.

Alan Goodwin, principal of Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda, Md., wrote in an e-mail Sunday to students and parents that Thomas would be replaced as speaker for the school's June 14 graduation.

"Graduation celebrations are not the venue for divisiveness," he wrote...

Blogger 'Yid with a Lid' highlights this charming video where the dean of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, tells jews to get out of Israel and go back to Poland and Germany.

Note that Thomas' remarks were made at a Jewish heritage event at the White House...

The White House press office is behaving more and more like an independent media outlet, bypassing traditional news avenues in favor of releasing its own "exclusive" video, voicing administration opinions on its official blog and blasting out updates via Twitter.

The trend has raised questions among the press corps about whether the administration is looking to just tap its own resources to make major announcements. President Obama leans more on internal media as he continues to criticize the "24/7" media environment -- singling out cable news, radio and blogs for occasional lectures -- and appears to be abandoning the prime-time press conference forum he used to discuss major developments during his first few months in office....

As the MRC’s Tim Graham documented yesterday, ABC and NBC's morning and evening newscasts have so far refused to tag Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan as a “liberal,” with CBS’s Jan Crawford offering the sole ideological label of the nominee on Monday's Evening News: “Her career has put her solidly on the left.”

In contrast, all three networks made a major deal out of the last person nominated by a Republican President for a slot on the Court, Justice Samuel Alito. Out of the first 21 stories on the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news shows after Justice Alito’s selection, correspondents conveyed ten explicit “conservative” labels during the first 36 hours of coverage. In contrast, Graham documented just one “liberal” label in 14 Kagan stories during the equivalent time period after her selection...

A conservative media watchdog organization is skeptical that a group critical of the Tea Party movement will be able to "infiltrate" the rallies in order to discredit the movement.

The Associated Press has reported that the group -- CrashTheTeaParty.org -- has the goal of dismantling the Tea Party movement "by trying to make its members appear to be racist, homophobic, and moronic."

Jason Levin, the website's creator, says the group has 65 leaders in major cities across the country trying to recruit members to infiltrate Tea Party events that begin April 15. According to the AP report, they want to exaggerate the group's least appealing qualities, further distance the Tea Party from mainstream America, and damage the public's opinion of them....

The big three television networks virtually ignored the massive, grass-roots "tea party" surge in 2009, and so far this year have maligned the movement as teeming with racists and violent fringe figures, according to a report by the Media Research Center.

"Rather than objectively document the rise and impact of this important grassroots movement, the 'news' networks instead chose to first ignore, and then deplore, the citizen army mobilizing against the unpopular policies of a liberal president and Congress," wrote MRC Research Director Rich Noyes.

As a nation-spanning "Tea Party Express" caravan plans to pull into Washington for a "tax day" rally on Thursday, a Rasmussen poll finds that the number of people who say they're part of the tea party movement nationally has grown to 24 percent, up from 16 percent a month ago...

A well-known black pastor and conservative activist says Tea Party organizers must do more to change the negative perception of the movement, crafted in large part by the mainstream media.

Recently, a column appeared in the Washington Post which painted Tea Party participants as racists. The mainstream media also has given significant airtime to an incident several weeks ago in which Congressman Emanuel Cleaver (D-Missouri) was allegedly spat upon by a Tea Party protester in Washington, DC.

Bishop Harry Jackson, chairman of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, has written an article titled "Is Brewing Tea Dangerous?" While he believes the Tea Party movement is a return to foundational American values, he believes it needs to "dispel the idea that it's a new manifestation of older racist movements"...

Racists. Nutbags. Radicals. Extremists. The Tea Party movement has been slammed as all these and more in the mainstream media, particularly since fringe elements of the group went screaming after members of Congress in the run-up to the health care vote.

But even as Tea Party "fury" has become all the rage in popular accounts of their protests, some observers say the rallies are nothing compared to the anti-Bush frenzy at Iraq War protests in years past — outbursts that the press generally ignored.

"What's interesting about the media's latest freak-out is that there were radicals aplenty under President Bush [who] protested in the streets [and] talked openly about revolution and killing," said Evan Coyne Maloney, a documentary filmmaker who has followed anti-war protests since 2003...

The Media Research Center (MRC) is blasting the mainstream media for its coverage of healthcare overhaul.

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, three quarters of adults feel news organizations did "only a fair [34%] to poor [41%] job" explaining details of the healthcare proposals.

Tim Graham, director of media analysis with the MRC, says most of the coverage leading up to the vote last Sunday was biased in favor of the president and his plan. He believes the mainstream press has been a close ally to the president during the healthcare debate...