On Tuesday night some of Washington's elite print and television journalists got together at the National Press Club for a friendly bull session with White House press flack Tony Snow.
There (over drinks and cocktail weenies?), they back slapped and complimented each other on the important and serious work they do, and indulged in what's become a favorite Beltway passtime. Trashing bloggers.
Tony Snow confessed to occasionally reading blogs. "It's amazing, you get this wonderful imaginative hateful stuff that comes flying out," he said.
Then Newsweek's Richard Wolffe chimed in ...
"There seems to be this sort of -- the witch hunt that's out there. A lot of the blogs are, are, are unduly devoted to media criticism which is itself kind of interesting given all the things you could comment on....
"In my humble view, the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general," Wolffe proclaimed, arguing that bloggers "want us to play a role that isn't really our role. Our role is to ask questions and get information..."
Really? Ask questions? Get information? Oh, you mean like you and others did in the runup to the US invasion of Iraq. How did that work again? You talked to unnamed administration sources. You wrote down what the unnamed administration sources said. And your papers and magazines printed the stuff.
I discovered the full extent of the "fantastic job" Richard Wolffe did during this time period by reading Glenn Greenwald's column on the Snow-press corps love fest in Salon.
Greenwald shows up Wolffe as the lickspittle stenographer he is through an outrageously unfair, sneakily underhanded technique often employed by dirty filthy stinking hippie bloggers. He quotes him -- reprints excerpts of articles Wolffe wrote back then. And to devastating effect. Then Greenwald cuts to the heart of the disease that afflicts Beltway journalism
"It is truly astonishing," he writes, "that the people who enabled the administration to spew one falsehood after the next -- and who aided and abetted the worst strategic disaster in our country's history by mindlessly passing those falsehoods along to their readers, completely failing to investigate any of it, but instead obediently validating it all with journalistic approval -- now want to sit around in the most self-satisfied way and pronounce that they are doing an absolutely 'fantastic job' and complain about the vulgar masses who disrupt their tranquility by criticizing them for being insufficiently vigilant.
"And to those American citizens who remain rather angry about the complete failure of the press to scrutinize the war-justifying claims made by their friends in the government -- and who wake up every day and devote themselves to trying to prod the press into performing its intended adversarial watchdog role so that our Government has at least some checks on what it can say and do -- people like Richard Wolffe have nothing to say other than to agree with Tony Snow that they are vulgar and hateful and to lecture them -- in his snidest and most condescending tone -- that they are just ignorant, confused, and unreasonably demanding.
"Truly, the spectacle of watching our country's leading White House journalists sitting there next to Tony Snow -- all of them oozing pomposity and self-satisfaction -- while Snow engineers the entire discussion and treats them like the friendly puppets that they are... is quite difficult to endure, but is nonetheless truly revealing."
And what can we expect from Richard Wolffe and his ilk in the future? Will he continue to puff out his chest and proclaim to the world that he's doing a fantastic job? Will he continue to "ask questions and get information" out like a postman delivering the mail? Very probably.
Even though what he should be doing as a journalist is questioning the answers.