http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpOpKbaoTbg

What do you guys think of this? This is from a townhall meeting held on 7/1/2009.

Its about time some voices in the media stepped up to the plate. I never would have suspected Ole Helen to be the one though.

[Edited on July 7, 2009 at 11:48 PM. Reason : .]

7/7/2009 11:47:51 PM

So when the media is grilling the Bush admin for their deception, it's the "Evil Lie-beral media," but when they scrutinize the Obama admin, they are "waking up?

haha

7/7/2009 11:56:27 PM

I heard a theory that the liberal press was only mad because the town hall meetings were more focused on the bloggers not the mainstream media, so they felt left out. i am still confident that the mainstream press remains firmly in the tank for Obama.

7/7/2009 11:57:02 PM

^^please contribute to a thread instead of making pointless comments that neither support or refute the idea presented. Lets try to have a decent debate for once here.....

^I absolutely agree. However, this is the first time I've seen the press really dig in and play hardball with this administration.

7/8/2009 12:18:52 AM

helen thomas seemed pretty pissed that huffpo got preferential treatment. not a word would have been said if similar was done for a newspaper or wire service.

7/8/2009 12:28:39 AM

^^ It does pertain to this thread. By your standards, the media has always been "awake."

7/8/2009 12:35:17 AM

so, by "finally", are we to assume you're talking about simply changes they may be making from the last 6 months, or from, you know..... 20-30 years of constantly degrading quality.


^^ yeah, somehow I doubt Helen Thomas is riding the "new media" wave. I won't defend the Huffington Post event specifically, but at some point the national media will have to acknowledge that this little thing called "the Internet" exists and they aren't the only players in town any more.

7/8/2009 7:42:30 AM

message_topic.aspx?topic=527139&page=8

7/8/2009 7:48:04 AM

Quote :

"It does pertain to this thread. By your standards, the media has always been "awake.""

Except during presidental grace periods.....and

Helen made a couple of comments. She said that they were doing this not only now, but during the campaign. She also said that no other Administration had ever done this level of censorship and that woman has been there a loooooooong time. No one in the media except for the crazy, loonbat conservatives expressed these views until NOW. Therefore, I think Obamas grace period is fading and I'd expect more of this in the future.

^^I agree to some extent with you. However, I think Helen and Chip's points are valid. Digital forms of media can be filtered, and screened. Obama's peeps could be the ones sending in questions and every other question could be disregarded for all we know! The level of credibility is much lower if you ask me......

7/8/2009 11:00:49 AM

Quote :

"Digital forms of media can be filtered, and screened. Obama's peeps could be the ones sending in questions and every other question could be disregarded for all we know! The level of credibility is much lower if you ask me......"

i suppose you're forgetting the whole deal with bush knowing the questions that reporters would ask before they ask them. . .

from 2004:

Quote :

"QUESTION: "Thank you, Mr. President. In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you'd made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have learned from it?" BUSH: I wish you'd have given me this written question ahead of time so I could plan for it. "

[Edited on July 8, 2009 at 11:16 AM. Reason : .]

7/8/2009 11:04:54 AM

Quote :

"I never would have suspected Ole Helen to be the one though."

Helen is an op ed writer now, so it doesn't surprise me at all that she "stepped up".

Quote :

"She said that they were doing this not only now, but during the campaign."

Can you tell me at what time in that youtube clip she makes that statement? Because I watched it twice, and she says nothing about what they did during the campaign.

7/8/2009 11:21:14 AM

This thread is hilarious.

7/8/2009 12:59:28 PM

^^The statement I'm refering too takes place at 2:20 by Chip not Helen. Sorry. After replaying it about a dozen times, I cant tell if hes saying "unlike the campaign" or "just like the campaign" or "like the campaign".

^^^I'm not forgetting anything. Are you defending this Admin by saying Bush did it also? Surely you dont want to make that correlation, right?

^Glad you can contribute to the discussion.

Helen says in the video that this is the biggest sham of a townhall meeting that she's ever seen by anyone in the whitehouse for crying out loud and the only way Gibbs defends the Administration is to laugh like its not true!

[Edited on July 8, 2009 at 1:12 PM. Reason : .]

7/8/2009 1:11:41 PM

no i'm saying the cognitive dissonance is stunning in helen thomas and the rest of the press corps.

7/8/2009 1:19:19 PM

Quote :

"I cant tell if hes saying "unlike the campaign" or "just like the campaign" or "like the campaign". "

He says "unlike his campaign".

7/8/2009 1:50:30 PM

Quote :

"^Glad you can contribute to the discussion. "

Okay, here's my contribution. Helen Thomas was right. She's right about Obama. She was also right about Bush. She's been in the press for 65 years, covering the presidency for nearly 50, and when asked about Bush she said "I'm covering the worst president in American history." Hyperbole, possibly, but I don't disagree that he is, in the very least, the worst president is most people's living memory. Obama has, as of now, broken or not yet met many of his campaign promises, and for this I have a hard time forgiving him. To be honest, I feel completely betrayed by Obama. He's the first presidential candidate I donated money to, and because of that I feel like I will probably never donate money to another candidate again. And yet, every single fucking day, I thank my lucky stars that John McCain and Sarah Palin aren't in office. I thank god that George W. Bush is gone for good. I think that, after this election, I have finally realized that all elections are indeed a choice between the lesser of two evils, and not just on a semantic level. And despite the fact that DADT is still in place, despite the fact that indefinite detention of people proven not guilty is still on the table, despite the fact town halls are, just as they were in the past, largely staged, I am so fucking thankful that Barack Obama is the president. Jesus Christ. It could be so much worse.

On a further note, and I say this hoping it won't distract from my point as related to this actual thread, I think your history as a poster proves that you, bigun20, are a very special combination of ignorant and stupid, that any sort of logical or informed discourse with you is impossible, and that you make both this site and this country worse for that fact. THE END. GO AMERICA.

7/8/2009 2:20:42 PM

i don't know. i still think that obama's intentions are good. just that maybe he plays the cautious middle ground too much.

kleiman wrote this a couple days ago regarding repealing DADT:

Quote :

"Whenever His Catholic Majesty Ferdinand of Aragon, most powerful and wise prince, was about to embark on some new enterprise, or make a decision of great importance. he went about it in such a way that, before his intentions were known, the whole court and the people were already insisting and exclaiming that the king must do such and so. Then he would announce his decision, just when all hoped and clamored for it. If by waiting an extra year Obama can make this come from the Pentagon brass hats rather than having to force it down their throats, it will be worth it, not just from his viewpoint but from the viewpoint of gay servicemembers."

one can hope that this is obama's tactic. but whether it is or not, we should get in his face about things that he has yet to do that he should or things that he has already done that he shouldn't.

7/8/2009 3:30:43 PM

and as if on cue, patrick murphy takes the lead on the dadt repeal bill in congress:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/08/rep-patrick-murphy-iraq-v_n_228000.html

7/8/2009 4:16:54 PM

Quote :

"So when the media is grilling the Bush admin for their deception, it's the "Evil Lie-beral media,""

I actually think the media did a piss-poor job of reporting leading up to the war in Iraq. However, the media relies too strongly on the press offices of individual political leaders for news, they're never going to bite the hand that feeds them unless the story is so strong and corroborated that they know they'll bring this person down, or at least temporarily to their knees.

The only other thing that will turn them is pissing them off, like the Bush administration and like the town hall meeting apparently did. In that sense, red baron 22 is right. They were more pissed about being left out than the questions themselves.

7/8/2009 4:27:02 PM

^ the media DID do a piss-poor job on the run-up to the Iraq war. But Bush was still riding the 9/11 wave then, and anyone that questioned him was anti-American terrorist-lovers.

I fully support the press giving the WH press secretary a hard time, btw.

[Edited on July 8, 2009 at 4:52 PM. Reason : ]

7/8/2009 4:51:44 PM

Yeah, it really sounds more like the press is pissed about not being invited than it is about what the actual questions and answers are. Truthfully, Gibbs did a better job of handling this than normal.

This White House is much better than the Bush administration at controlling its image in the media and better, even, than the Clinton administration. That being said, I'm glad to see we're moving away from "glistening pectorals" and "he's almost God like" descriptions.

7/8/2009 7:20:34 PM

no they're pissed because obama is giving their principal competition (huffpo and politico) a fair shot at getting questions in press conferences.

7/8/2009 7:24:43 PM

That really isn't anything different from what I'm saying. The "old" media is finding itself increasingly irrelevant since, well, it is generally light on the whole "journalism" thing. What major scandal has the media actually broken since Iran-Contra?

Reduced revenues have caused them to shrink their staff. Smaller staffs mean more work for individual reporters, more work means they have to rely on what they can get their hands on without digging. Thus, they're at the mercy of press offices, which really means we can cut the middleman out of the deal.

Hence the competition from the "new" media and their anger at being pushed out of their formerly safe spot in the world.

7/8/2009 7:35:24 PM

damn you amazon.com

7/8/2009 10:46:37 PM