• BEST OF THE WEB TODAY
• JUNE 8, 2010

‘A Living Icon of Journalism’

The Society of Professional Journalists honors Helen Thomas. Still!

By JAMES TARANTO

Among her many honors, Helen Thomas, who “retired” yesterday as a columnist for Hearst Newspapers, in 2000 received the Helen Thomas Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Society of Professional Journalists. As the SPJ’s website explains:

The Award is named after longtime White House correspondent Helen Thomas, a living icon of journalism for her dogged pursuit of the truth in a career that has spanned almost 60 years.

We’ve been calling Thomas “American journalism’s crazy old aunt in the attic” for years, and the events of the past few days should have laid to rest any question of which description is more accurate, ours or the SPJ’s. We wondered, then, whether SPJ planned to continue giving out the Helen Thomas Award, and last night we emailed Lauren Rochester, the society’s awards coordinator, to ask.

“I’m going to refer [you] to Kevin Smith, SPJ national president,” she replied first thing this morning, helpfully supplying us with an email and two phone numbers. We emailed Smith this morning and left messages on both numbers just after noon Eastern time. We have not heard from him.

Smith did, however, find time yesterday to talk with David Weigel of the Washington Post, who reported that the society “may rename” the award:

Kevin Smith, the president of the SPJ, tells me that members of the executive board have been in touch with one another over “whether we need to consider this.”

“I’m not personally inclined to advocate for this,” Smith said. “Helen Thomas has been a member and supporter of SPJ for a very long time, and do we throw all that away for this last transgression? On the other hand, if you were Jewish and given this award, would you go up and accept it? Without taking a knee-jerk approach, you need to consider other perspectives.”

Smith told me that the SPJ’s board will meet in late July to discuss other issues, and that’s when the subject of renaming the award–which was first given to Thomas in 2000–could come up. “But if this thing escalates,” Smith said, “we won’t wait until then.”

And after all, these guys are only professional journalists. It’s not as if they’re in a business in which they routinely have to deal with fast-breaking information.

OK, we couldn’t resist, but that was a cheap shot. Kevin Smith teaches at West Virginia’s Fairmont State University. He’s a professor of journalism, which sounds a lot like “professional journalist,” but there’s a huge difference–trust us.

The really appalling thing about Smith’s interview with Weigel is this line: “On the other hand, if you were Jewish and given this award, would you go up and accept it?” How about if you were a decent human being? (There are at least a few among the ranks of professional journalists–trust us.) The notion that only Jews would take exception to Thomas’s call for ethnic cleansing–or to the SPJ’s crediting her with “dogged pursuit of the truth”–is obtuse, to say the least.

Nine journalists other than Helen Thomas have accepted the Helen Thomas Award, perhaps because they were unfamiliar with her work. Now, though, no one has such an excuse–which means that if the SPJ decides to keep the award going, it may have trouble finding someone willing to collect it. But we can help:

The obvious choice for this year’s honor is Patrick Buchanan, a syndicated columnist and commentator for MSNBC and “The McLaughlin Group,” who has a long history of practicing journalism in the spirit of Helen Thomas. And he’s definitely not Jewish!

But we’d like to suggest a dark-horse contender: Paul Craig Roberts, also a syndicated columnist (and late-1970s veteran of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page). In September 2002 Roberts put forward this proposal, in a column you can still find at VDare.com, a usually anti-immigration website:

Terminate the Middle Eastern conflict by inviting the 5 million Jews in Israel to settle in the U.S.

The entire population of Israel amounts to no more than two years of illegal Mexican immigration. The Jews can function here, if they wish, as an autonomous ethnic enclave just like all the other enclaves created by our shortsighted immigration policy. . . .

Trying to create a small Jewish state in a sea of Muslims was a 20th century mistake. Trying to reconstruct the Middle East would be a bigger mistake.

Why not recognize the mistake, evacuate the Jews, leave the Muslims to themselves, and focus on saving our own country?

Meanwhile, MLive.com reports that Michigan’s Wayne State University, from which Thomas graduated in 1942, may remove her name from the Helen Thomas Spirit of Diversity Awards reception. But Ben Burns of the Wayne State journalism school, went “on to say the university will continue to offer a Helen Thomas journalism scholarship.” Something tells us they’ll have to pay some kid to take that off their hands.

Yeah, It’s Called the Attic!
“Isn’t There Some Room for Helen Thomas?”–headline, Washington Post website, June 7

Mr. Bad Example
You just can’t make this stuff up. From the Associated Press:

Don’t mimic Washington by making excuses, President Barack Obama advised graduating high school students on Monday night as he urged them to take responsibility for failure as well as success.

In remarks at Kalamazoo Central High School, Obama said it’s easy to blame others when problems arise.

“We see it every day out in Washington, with folks calling each other names and making all sorts of accusations on TV,” the president said.

He said the high school kids can and have done better than that.

True enough. When was the last time you heard a high school kid complain about the “mess” he “inherited” from George W. Bush? And Politico reports that the president had this to say in an interview with NBC’s Matt Lauer:

“I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar. We talk to these folks because they, potentially, have the best answers so I know whose ass to kick,” Obama told NBC.

The AP story closes by describing the president pressing the flesh in Kalamazoo:

About an hour before the graduates filed into the arena, Obama surprised them by dropping into the recreation center as they got ready for the biggest day of their lives to date.

Walking around with a hand-held microphone, Obama told the students to work hard, keep their eyes on the prize and continue to carry with them a sense of excellence.

“There is nothing you can’t accomplish,” he said, adding that they should consider public service. “I might be warming up the seat for you.”

That is, unless he decides to kick your ass.

How They Got Teleprompters He’ll Never Know
“Obama Addressing High School Graduates With Teleprompters”–headline, RealClearPolitics.com, June 7

‘Nothing Is More Beautiful Than Martyrdom’
Israel-haters are making much of the fact that one of the Turkish “humanitarians” killed last week while attempting to break Israel’s naval blockade of Hamas was a U.S. citizen. This, however, was by accident of birth: Furkan Dogan was born in Troy, N.Y., but his parents were Turkish and he grew up in Turkey.

“His brother, Mustafa, told the Turkish news media that he was ‘clean-hearted with a happy face,’ ” the New York Times reported Friday. But a report from the Middle East Research Institute says he was far from the all-American boy the Israel-haters are making him out to be. Memri quotes Hussein Orish of IHH, the Turkish outfit that instigated the flotilla:

“One of the martyrs was 19 years old. We’ve just found his last diary in his suitcase. The last lines he wrote before the attack were: ‘Only a short time left before martyrdom. This is the most important stage of my life. Nothing is more beautiful than martyrdom, except for one’s love for one’s mother. But I don’t know what is sweeter–my mother or martyrdom.’ This was the last thing that the martyr Furkan wrote, and the last thing said by our brothers. . . .”

“Clean-hearted” indeed!