Helen Thomas died yesterday. If you were around during her long tenure, you might still hear her voice in the scrum of the White House press room during those things called press conferences that presidents used to have.
She was fearless. And in her later years, she lamented the decline of the fourth estate:
… Did we invade those countries?
At that point McClellan called on another reporter.
Those were the days when I longed for ABC-TV’s great Sam Donaldson to back up my questions as he always did, and I did the same for him and other daring reporters. Then I realized that the old pros, reporters whom I had known in the past, many of them around during World War II and later the Vietnam War, reporters who had some historical perspective on government deception and folly, were not around anymore.
I honestly believe that if reporters had put the spotlight on the flaws in the Bush Administration’s war policies, they could have saved the country the heartache and the losses of American and Iraqi lives.
It is past time for reporters to forget the party line, ask the tough questions and let the chips fall where they may.
She did not live to see the day. Increasingly it’s evident that none of us will, this notion of asking objective, truth-seeking questions being so very twentieth century.