Glenn Greenwald Interview With Helen Thomas

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

Glenn Greenwald
Thursday June 28, 2007 10:39 EST
Interview with Helen Thomas

Last Thursday, I wrote about an acrimonious exchange at the White House press gaggle between Helen Thomas and Tony Snow regarding the number of Iraqis who have been killed during the war. Thomas relentlessly challenged the administration's tactic of labelling everyone killed in Iraq a "terrorist," and demanded to know how many Iraqi civilians had been killed during the four-year-and-counting war. Snow claimed he did not know the answer because the U.S does not "track" that information.

About that exchange, I wrote: "It is unnecessary to identify the reporter asking these questions because there is really only one White House correspondent who would." Several commenters suggested an interview with Thomas, and following up on those suggestions, I interviewed Thomas this morning regarding the state of modern journalism, the Bush administration and related issues.

Following is a verbatim transcript of that interview, edited solely for length:

GG: You have covered every President since John Kennedy. I wanted to ask if you could identify how the White House press corps has changed over time, if it has, and what differences are there in terms of how journalists cover presidents?

HT: Well, that's a big order. But I do think that in the good olden days, reporters were really straight reporters. I worked for a wire service, UPI, for 57 years, and I covered the White House for UPI from the 70s onto Bush, and then became a columnist. So I certainly know both sides.

As a wire service reporter, I played it straight, with the facts, which is absolutely required of a wire service reporter. But that doesn't mean I bowed out of the human race. I permitted myself to think, to care, to believe, but it didn't get in my copy.

I did think that tough questions were always very important. With Kennedy, we knew he enjoyed the banter with the press, and he had the first live televised news conferences. And it made a big difference in terms of really capturing the imagination of the public. It was the first time they really saw reporters in action, they saw a witty president that was able to dodge questions as deftly as anyone, and he had great eloquence. That was the first time the American people really became interested in presidential news conferences.

And then Johnson had a love-hate relationship with the press. He couldn't live without us, and yet at the same time, he thought we were hurting him every day. The words "credibility gap" were created in that era.

more...

She not only knows history, and has seen history, she IS part of history,
and to hear all this stuff first hand is a privilege. She has forgotten
more interesting stories than Tim Russert, or anyone else alive, has on tape
in their archives.

She has an attitude and an integrity that are foreign to 99% of the press
out there these days. They have this MTV standard that is as foreign to
Helen's way of doing things as a Superman comic is to a Gutenberg Bible.

would that it were that there were more real journalists like her instead of this plethora of posers and handsomely paid sycophants and stenographers masquerading as truth seekers and tellers.

Thank goodness she is still among us and may she long be so.

fearless truthteller.