Don’t worry, Yahoo will have their Obama knee pads back on again shortly, but at least enjoy the moment: an interactive Webpage featuring, “The top 9,486 ways Jay Carney won’t answer your questions:”
Jay Carney doesn’t have an answer for that. He hasn’t discussed that subject with the president. He will refer you to the Department of [insert agency here]. He refuses to speculate on that. He’ll have to get back to you.
But he appreciates the question.
A Yahoo News analysis of the 444 briefings that Carney has held since becoming White House press secretary has identified 13 distinct strains in the way he dodges a reporter’s question. Since Carney held his first daily briefing with reporters in the White House Brady Press Briefing Room on Feb. 16, 2011, for example, he’s used some variation of “I don’t have the answer” more than 1,900 times. In 1,383 cases he referred a question to someone else. But will he at least speculate on hypotheticals? No. In fact, he has refused to do so 525 times.
As Twitchy notes, “Hardest hit? Buzzfeed.”
But what would Jay Carney the journalist think about Jay Carney the press secretary? He’d naturally loathe him, and would be the first to call out his duplicity — but only if he was flacking for a president with (R) after his name, of course. Because that’s what Time-Warner-CNN-HBO employees do.
In the meantime, the White Washing oozes on; somewhere, Ron Ziegler and his boss are loving every moment of this.
Update: John Nolte of Big Journalism is right: “This Yahoo News analysis showing that White House spokesman Jay Carney did not answer 9,486 questions posed to him by the White House Press Corps is not a blight on Carney’s record; it is a blight on the record of a lapdog media that allows him to persistently get away with not answering questions.”
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