Radical Chic And Mau-Mauing the Flak Catcher

Ed Morrissey links to Jeff Jacoby’s latest essay on the cowardly nature of the American press and writes:

At the same time, the same media outlets that have kept its customers in the dark in one of the most important stories in the conflict with radical Islamists screeched like banshees when Dick Cheney took all of eighteen hours to reveal that he had accidentally shot his hunting partner and friend on a Saturday afternoon. For days, these stalwarts of journalistic courage took turns castigating Scott McClellan for Cheney’s failure to give the story to the White House press corps, arguing that the story was so important that it could not be trusted to the Corpus Christi local paper to inform the nation. David Gregory, whose network has not even allowed a pixilated version of the Prophet cartoons to appear lest they incur the wrath of Muslim terrorists, accused the White House of censorship and coverups in supposedly hiding the shooting from the nation.

Jacoby has this correct. The media attacks those who they know will not spend much energy fighting back. Gregory could act like a rude, spoiled child denied his choice of birthday gift because he knew the White House would not dare to even expel him from the room.

Expel him? If I were in the Bush White House I’d go out of my way to encourage this sort of behavior on camera as much as possible.

The Washington Press Corp–by their behavior both in and out of the White House–did much to advance the Bush Press Thesis this past week–to the point where the light bulb is just now starting to slowly go on inside even David Gregory’s head about how badly he and his comrades looked.