Maddow: Citizens and press corps not in step

[Redfairen]

Unlike many of her colleagues in punditry, Rachel Maddow doesn’t ridicule the White House press corps for making a big deal of its exclusion from a presidential golf outing with Tiger Woods over the weekend. Instead she focuses on the trend in which our country’s top officials bypass the official media in favor of direct chats with citizens, often with the able assistance of the Internet.

She notes that Parents magazine recently held a Facebook Q & A with Vice President Biden, complete with impressive questions such as: “Should parents who don`t have guns in their homes demand to know which of their children`s friends are gun owners?”

She also cited these questions, from other online forums with the White House: “Should Internet freedom be added to the party platform of the Democratic Party? Should Democrats take a stand on that as a party?…The mortgage interest deduction that helps people afford their homes, what’s going to be happening to that? And will the White House take action to limit the abuse of software patents? Would they, for example, support limiting software patents to just five years?”

Here’s the part that concerns Maddow: That the questions from everyday citizens seem to be distinct from the questions that the White House press corps poses. “It is worrying about the press corps that those two streams of questions being directed at the White House from citizens and from the Beltway press often seem like they are from two totally different universes.”


http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/02/20/maddow-citizens-and-press-corps-not-in-step/

[WI_DEM]

1. The White House press corp are a bunch of pampered babies who are making a mountain out of a molehil

who cares if they didn't cover Obama playing golf with Tiger Woods. How about the White House press corp acting like real journalists?

[LonePirate]

2. The WH Press Corps is only interested in what their corporate masters dictate.

They have no concern for the lives and issues facing the average American, hence the different types of questions.

[mountain grammy]

3. I watched this segment on Maddow, and it was excellent!

The press doesn't ask the questions we want answered, and if they do, they don't follow up. This has been the direction of the press since the 80's. It was almost as if they saw the big part they played in getting us out of Vietnam, realized the power they had, and turned it loose for the corporations that own them. And that, my friends, was "morning in America," and a big majority of Americans bought into the lies.

[dmosh42]

4. The WH press corp is totally representative of Fux news and big media....

They don't give a shit where the citizen's concerns are, only the big money people. Some examples have been the Wall St meltdown and who should be prosecuted and going to war in Iraq for made up reasons.

[Bluenorthwest]

5. The press corp lost all credibility when they welcomed Jeff Gannon as a peer.

nt