Sunday, July 28, 2013
White House Press Secretary Hasn't Known the Answer 1,905 Times
Jay Carney — former Time reporter, current White House Press Secretary, and weekly punching bag — has spoken for President Obama and his staff during the most fraught period of Obama's presidency. He was installed in February 2011, less than a month after a fresh class of Tea Party politicians settled into office, and stayed on through the following summer's debt-ceiling crisis; the attacks in Benghazi, Libya; the overheated 2012 election; the Democratic push for increased gun control; and, most recently a spate of scandals involving the IRS, the NSA, and the Department of Justice. That might explain why, in the 444 press briefings Carney had held since, he has so often deflected questions from reporters. To place one number on his frequent prevarications, Yahoo News determined that Carney indicated he "did not have the answer" to journalists' questions exactly 1,905 times since he began flacking for the President, a subset of nearly 10,000 instances when Carney declined to answer, passed off the question to a subordinate, or claimed ignorance about the subject matter. The entire report forms a brutal dossier of Carney's tenure.
The compilation certainly delivers a sting, in part because Carney is sui generis among his contemporary predecessors. Unlike, say, Robert Gibbs (who recently opened PR firm) or Ari Fleischer (now a sports publicist), or even George Stephanopoulos (who became an ABC News anchor), Carney worked as a journalist at Time for twenty years before becoming the mouthpiece of powerful politicians. (He served as spokesman for for Joe Biden during the 2008 election before Obama tapped him to deal with reporters.) The only recent predecessor who followed a similar career track, Tony Snow, edited opinion pieces for a series of newspapers before joining the first Bush White House as a speech writer, and later the second Bush White House as a press secretary in 2006. Unlike Snow, Carney was perpetually concerned with seeking out the factual truth, especially from those in power. It must at least slightly pain him, then, to inform his former cohort, over and over and over again — literally thousands of times — that he, and by extension the President himself, doesn't know the answer to this or that question. At the same time, he must know how it feels to be told the same.
Are media buying into ‘phony scandal’ claim?
Conservative leaders allege the media are trying to ignore the
once high-profile scandals overshadowing the Obama administration, as
President Obama and his aides aggressively push the claim that these
controversies are "phony."
The "phony scandal" line was the unofficial talking point of the week in Washington. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made it his fallback retort from the podium -- when asked about the president's new wave of speeches on the economy, Carney explained Obama was trying to refocus Washington away from "fake" controversies.
For three speeches in a row, Obama hammered this refrain: "With this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball."
But, at least on the IRS targeting scandal, both the Obama administration and the mainstream media took that controversy quite seriously when it broke in May. MSNBC's Chris Hayes called the selective screening of conservative groups a "genuine abuse of power" at the time.
Fast forward two months. As Obama hit the trail to talk economy, two CNN anchors this week described the controversies that had dogged him as "so-called scandals."
The conservative Media Research Center also calculates that on the Big Three network news channels -- NBC, CBS, and ABC -- the number of stories on the IRS scandal has plummeted.
The evening and morning shows did 96 stories in the first two weeks, according to MRC. The coverage steadily disappeared, and between June 28 and July 24, the center recorded "zero stories" on the matter.
When a major development broke last week -- testimony by a retired IRS worker that an Obama appointee was involved in the screening process -- only CBS Evening News gave the issue a mention.
Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, and other conservative leaders issued a statement Thursday decrying the alleged blackout.
"No fair, objective journalist can look at the facts of this flagrant abuse of power and not conclude that it is a massive political scandal deserving of constant, merciless scrutiny," they said in a statement.
Even before Obama and his team began pushing the "phony scandal" line, a few media outlets and personalities were making that case. Salon published an article on the IRS issue earlier this month asserting that, in the end, "the entire scandal narrative was a fiction."
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell made the same argument.
But given the attention their own networks gave the IRS and other scandals just a few weeks earlier, a number of journalists and media personalities refused to go easy on the president this week.
On MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough ripped into Carney on Wednesday after the press secretary claimed the attention on "phony scandals" had all "come to naught."
"Do you think the IRS scandal is a phony scandal?" Scarborough asked.
Carney described it as "inappropriate activity," claiming that the press got "extremely excited" about the potential for scandal only to drop it when the "facts came out."
Scarborough, getting heated, pointed out new allegations that the controversy went all the way up to the IRS counsel's office, led by a political appointee. After Carney accused the host of pushing a GOP talking point, Scarborough said: "Stop your games with me. ... I'm not playing your games. I'm not somebody you talk ... down to from your podium."
Carney closed by asserting the IRS controversy was not a scandal because the White House was not involved.
Congressional Democrats have tried to downplay the IRS scandal lately by pointing to emerging evidence that liberal groups may have been singled out in IRS criteria as well. The matter is still being investigated. However, as Republicans note, liberal groups have not come forward to say they actually were targeted -- as conservative and Tea Party groups have done, by the dozens.
And the other so-called "phony scandals" continue to churn in Washington.
After the Obama administration took heat for seizing phone and email records from journalists, the Department of Justice earlier this month released new guidelines for investigations involving reporters -- in response to the outcry. The administration continues to battle with Congress over the surveillance power of the National Security Agency -- narrowly defeating a House bill this past week that would have reined in the NSA.
And on the Benghazi terror attack, Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and others continue to raise serious questions about what happened that night and why lawmakers have not been provided access to the survivors.
Becky Gerritson, a Tea Party activist whose group was stalled by the IRS and who testified about it on Capitol Hill, took umbrage at the administration's "phony scandal" line.
"I think it's like the captain of the Titanic calling the icebergs phony," she said. "I think the only phony thing going on is the narrative that the White House is trying to push off on the American people."
The "phony scandal" line was the unofficial talking point of the week in Washington. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney made it his fallback retort from the podium -- when asked about the president's new wave of speeches on the economy, Carney explained Obama was trying to refocus Washington away from "fake" controversies.
For three speeches in a row, Obama hammered this refrain: "With this endless parade of distractions and political posturing and phony scandals, Washington has taken its eye off the ball."
But, at least on the IRS targeting scandal, both the Obama administration and the mainstream media took that controversy quite seriously when it broke in May. MSNBC's Chris Hayes called the selective screening of conservative groups a "genuine abuse of power" at the time.
Fast forward two months. As Obama hit the trail to talk economy, two CNN anchors this week described the controversies that had dogged him as "so-called scandals."
The conservative Media Research Center also calculates that on the Big Three network news channels -- NBC, CBS, and ABC -- the number of stories on the IRS scandal has plummeted.
The evening and morning shows did 96 stories in the first two weeks, according to MRC. The coverage steadily disappeared, and between June 28 and July 24, the center recorded "zero stories" on the matter.
When a major development broke last week -- testimony by a retired IRS worker that an Obama appointee was involved in the screening process -- only CBS Evening News gave the issue a mention.
Brent Bozell, founder of the Media Research Center, and other conservative leaders issued a statement Thursday decrying the alleged blackout.
"No fair, objective journalist can look at the facts of this flagrant abuse of power and not conclude that it is a massive political scandal deserving of constant, merciless scrutiny," they said in a statement.
Even before Obama and his team began pushing the "phony scandal" line, a few media outlets and personalities were making that case. Salon published an article on the IRS issue earlier this month asserting that, in the end, "the entire scandal narrative was a fiction."
MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell made the same argument.
But given the attention their own networks gave the IRS and other scandals just a few weeks earlier, a number of journalists and media personalities refused to go easy on the president this week.
On MSNBC, host Joe Scarborough ripped into Carney on Wednesday after the press secretary claimed the attention on "phony scandals" had all "come to naught."
"Do you think the IRS scandal is a phony scandal?" Scarborough asked.
Carney described it as "inappropriate activity," claiming that the press got "extremely excited" about the potential for scandal only to drop it when the "facts came out."
Scarborough, getting heated, pointed out new allegations that the controversy went all the way up to the IRS counsel's office, led by a political appointee. After Carney accused the host of pushing a GOP talking point, Scarborough said: "Stop your games with me. ... I'm not playing your games. I'm not somebody you talk ... down to from your podium."
Carney closed by asserting the IRS controversy was not a scandal because the White House was not involved.
Congressional Democrats have tried to downplay the IRS scandal lately by pointing to emerging evidence that liberal groups may have been singled out in IRS criteria as well. The matter is still being investigated. However, as Republicans note, liberal groups have not come forward to say they actually were targeted -- as conservative and Tea Party groups have done, by the dozens.
And the other so-called "phony scandals" continue to churn in Washington.
After the Obama administration took heat for seizing phone and email records from journalists, the Department of Justice earlier this month released new guidelines for investigations involving reporters -- in response to the outcry. The administration continues to battle with Congress over the surveillance power of the National Security Agency -- narrowly defeating a House bill this past week that would have reined in the NSA.
And on the Benghazi terror attack, Rep. Frank Wolf, R-Va., and others continue to raise serious questions about what happened that night and why lawmakers have not been provided access to the survivors.
Becky Gerritson, a Tea Party activist whose group was stalled by the IRS and who testified about it on Capitol Hill, took umbrage at the administration's "phony scandal" line.
"I think it's like the captain of the Titanic calling the icebergs phony," she said. "I think the only phony thing going on is the narrative that the White House is trying to push off on the American people."
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