The national press corps has done a pretty good imitation of a beta male for the past year, saying nothing but “yes, dear” and “anything you say, dear” to President Barack Obama.
Until recently, the only White House press corps reporters who have shown any journalistic independence and watchdog intensity have been ABC’s Jake Tapper and Fox’s Major Garrett.
But yesterday, CBS’s Chip Reid, whose Wikipedia page says, ironically, that he “assumed the position on Jan. 5,” decided he was tired of the unchanging view of the beta male. He aggressively challenged Obama’s hapless press secretary Robert Gibbs over Obama’s broken promise to let C-SPAN televise the health care logrolling session.
This left Gibbs sputtering, his fish-like maw drawn peevishly tight. As one Washington reporter put it on her Twitter page last night: “If Gibbs had a cologne brand, it would be called Cornered Petulance, and it would smell remarkably like Scott McClellan. ”
The media has been a lagging indicator of Obama’s popularity, continuing to worship the golden-tongued man-child even as the vast rabble from coast to coast has soured on the president’s TelePrompTer glibness. That may be changing, if even CBS is beginning to see that the emperor is less than fully clothed.
Over the years, when the media was confronted with charges of bias against Republicans and conservatives, a common rejoinder was, “We’re not biased. We just hate incompetence.” Well, it’s time to test that. As we have seen since Christmas, there is ample incompetence to go around in Washington these days, not just in the executive branch, but in the legislative, as well.
The congressional health care sausage making is the nexus where the incompetence of both branches comes together in one glorious cluster farge. Obama promised on the campaign trail last year eight times that the health care debate would be open to all, with all deal-making airing on C-SPAN in unmediated glory.
But Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (no relation to Chip) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are taking the Chicago approach, if you like, by flipping the figurative bird to the American public. All deliberations between the two houses will be behind closed doors. The public will be shut out, just as all Republican have been shut out of the process since the beginning.
As Chip Reid showed, if there’s one thing even a liberal reporter hates it’s being shut out of a meeting that should be public. Will those who cover Congress be as feisty as Reid and hold legislators’ feet to the fire? Will they throw off their beta male traits or continue to be happy watching the alpha male’s behind for the rest of this first term?
Only time will tell. As a Washington Examiner editorial put it this morning:
To be sure, many of the reporters on the Hill gripe and complain to each other and to their editors about these closed-door meetings. And many of them stand keeping vigil outside the doors, waiting for Reid or Pelosi to come out and offer them a morsel of information. But that’s not good enough. It’s time for a sit-down protest by journalists whose first job is to uphold the public’s right to know what its government is doing. Invite readers to come join them in demanding open meetings. The last thing Reid and Pelosi want is the spectacle of the Capitol Hill Police dragging protesting journalists away from the closed doors. It’s time to show some cojones, people.
Jon Ham is vice president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of its newspaper, Carolina Journal.