-By Warner Todd Huston
Since I wrote and submitted my piece on Helen Thomas comparing the firestorm of condemnation that occurred immediately after entertainer Don Imus made his race-tinged comments about the Rutgers basketball players to the relative kid gloves with which Helen Thomas is being handled over her outrageous anti-Israeli comments a few new things have occurred in the story.
First of all a few left leaning pundits have scolded Thomas, most prominently Clinton era operative Lanny Davis who issued a press release calling Thomas an “anti-Semitic bigot.”
Joe Klein, another left-wing pundit, posted a few short paragraphs saying that he felt Thomas should be moved from the front row to the back of the room, though he is obviously avoiding a call for her to be fired. Apparently her anti-Semitism isn’t bad enough for Klein to want her fired.
We also have learned that the speaker’s agency that used to shop Thomas as a speaker for various functions has removed her from its list of celebrity speakers. Nine Speaker, Inc. made the announcement Sunday that they would no longer rep her as a speaker to prospective events.
And now today, Monday June 7, Thomas herself has announced that she intends to retire from her multi-decade journalism career. Effective immediately, Thomas is done.
So, we are finally seeing some consequences to Thomas’ actions.
But what we aren’t seeing from the Old Media is the same amount of immediate condemnation of Thomas that Don Imus was confronted with. The Thomas affair, however, has never attained the sort of wide-spread vitriol, the wall-to-wall coverage that Imus saw.
With Imus every radio news break mentioned his infamy, every cable station followed the story, every newspaper and Network TV show talked of it. It couldn’t have been covered more heavily if Imus had taken a slow ride in a white Bronco on the Interstate. Yet, the understated coverage that Thomas has gotten pales by comparison.
So, even as we are finally seeing some consequences brought to Thomas as a result of her actions, it is almost despite the kid glove treatment that her friends in the Old Media have afforded her.
In any case, Helen Thomas is finally exiting the scene and under a dark cloud of her own making at that. This is a good thing. Her Jew-hating remarks should not be tolerated in a member of the media, especially one celebrated by presidents and given preferential treatment by administrations spanning decades.
Good riddance Helen Thomas.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 200 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDailyReview.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
Huston has been a frequent guest on talk-radio programs to discuss his opinion editorials and current events and is currently the co-host of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Conservatism” heard on BlogTalkRadio. Huston’s work has appeared on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Neil Bortz, and Michael Savage. He has appeared on the G. Gordon Liddy show, dozens of local shows from coast to coast, and many blogtalk radio shows.
Mr. Huston has appeared on local TV news to discuss his writing, has been a guest of CNN’s blogger lunch, and has appeared on Breitbart TV’s B-Team show.
Warner is also the editor of the Cook County Page for RedCounty.com and has a blog on the Tribune-Owned http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/publius-forum/ChicagoNow.com website. He is a well known writer on Illinois politics.
He has also written for several history magazines and appears in the book “Americans on Politics, Policy and Pop Culture” which can be purchased on amazon.com. He is also the owner and operator of PubliusForum.com. Feel free to contact him with any comments or questions : EMAIL Warner Todd Huston
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