“Handful of Reporters Make Colleagues Look Like Chumps”?

Jonah Goldberg thinks that the press is doing what it does best: patting itself on the back.

Endless Love
Concubines who say they’re merely highly compensated conversationalists.

Huzzah! Thanks to a few pointed questions from the press corps at a White House news conference, the long Obama captivity of the media is at an end. The Hotline, an inside-the-Beltway tip sheet, proclaimed June 23 “The Day the Love Ended.”

The New York Daily News’s Michael Goodwin celebrates the press corps’s ability to channel the mood of the country: “By peppering the President with forceful questions . . . and by challenging some of his slippery answers, reporters captured the changing tone in the country. Like the end of a real honeymoon, blind infatuation is giving way to a more accurate view of reality.”

“The press corps gets it,” Goodwin writes. “For Obama, the hard part begins now.”

Swamis and carnival contortionists who can fit their bodies into Happy Meal boxes could learn something from the press about flexibility, given its ability to effortlessly pat its own back.

Silly me, I thought the main job of the press was to challenge slippery answers and ask tough questions, not to do that only when it helps “capture a tone.”

But what truly confuses me is how a few tough questions make up for months of forehead-scraping obeisance to The One. Suddenly these half-dozen reporters are media redeemers? “They Asked Tough Questions for Our Sins.”

Indeed, shouldn’t this be a moment for reflection on how bad the press has been until now? Instead of “The Honeymoon Is Over,” why isn’t the headline, “Handful of Reporters Make Colleagues Look Like Chumps”?

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As Kool Aid–allergic columnist Robert Samuelson has noted, such sycophancy is a serious public-policy problem because the president is proposing a radical overhaul of pretty much everything, and for the most part the press hasn’t cared that his explanations are iffier than gas-station sushi and his assurances are more dubious than a North Korean press release. Obama’s ongoing promise that he’s “creating or saving” jobs is as plausible as the chess-team captain’s claim that his supermodel girlfriend can’t fly down from Canada for the prom.

Maybe the fly infestation at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has something to do with the fact that the White House is a central hub of bovine manure distribution?

There is no redemption for the press. It has compromised itself so far that, like a two bit crack whore, it's never going to get a marriage proposal.