'Race to the White House' takes wrong turn

The Last Word by Nathan Hathaway

I went to a journalism symposium Friday and a partisan propaganda party broke out.

Helen Thomas, a former White House correspondent and one of the most famous women in journalism, spoke at the Roger Tatarian Journalism Symposium at the Satellite Student Union on Friday and did little more than bash President Bush.

The speech, titled “The Race To The White House,” proved to be little more than an outlet for Thomas to air her political views and stump against the war.

She was very open in her criticism of the president and his actions in the war against Iraq.

This would have been an excellent opportunity to share her stories and experiences from the White House.

Instead she turned it into an all-out attack on the president.

She cited the Geneva Conventions, saying the way we have treated Iraqi prisoners violates that agreement.

We’re talking about a man who murdered his own people by the thousands, and we’re worried about the Geneva Conventions? And why are we talking about honoring the Geneva Conventions in the war against a country that was never been part of that accord?

These people are beheading Americans, on camera, and we have people in America up in arms over the way our people are treating them?

Thomas said she would love either Kerry or Bush to define “terror.”

The Heritage New World College Dictionary defines terror as “violence committed or threatened to intimidate or coerce, as for military or political purposes.” That sounds an awful lot like what Saddam Hussein regularly did before he was overthrown by coalition forces.

Taking machetes to Americans’ necks, for example, counts as terror.

So for Thomas to say that the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the war on terror is not only ignorant, it’s flat out wrong.

When asked why she thought the U.S. was really in Iraq, she gave the easy one-word answer, “oil,” to overwhelming applause from a clearly partisan audience. She said that the operation in Iraq had “been in the works. It’s been on the drawing board for a long time.”

That’s a shame, too. Maybe if we had taken it off the drawing board and put it into action a bit earlier, we could have saved hundreds of Iraqis’ lives from the death grip of Saddam Hussein.

It’s also extremely frustrating when hypocritical journalists blame the media—of which they are members, by the way—for failing to hold the Bush administration responsible for their actions.

New York Times Iraq correspondent Chris Hedges said the same thing when he came to speak at the same symposium last year. The media are letting the president get away with too much, they say.

Hedges said last year that the media wasn’t showing the real story in Iraq, and he blamed his colleagues. It’s odd, however, that he, a correspondent in Iraq, didn’t seem to shoulder any of the blame.

Thomas did no better Friday. A White House correspondent herself who has covered hundreds of presidential press conferences, Thomas said journalists “fell down on the job” of keeping the president accountable and that just now is the media “coming out of its coma.”

That sounds like a lot of finger-pointing from someone who should perhaps take a look in the mirror. If she finds “the media’s” conduct so despicable and faulty, maybe she should have spoken up herself.

Some White House stories from a White House correspondent would have been wonderful. “The Race to the White House” should have been more about Thomas’ battle through the ranks of journalism to reach the pinnacle of her profession, not about her views regarding this election.