The other day a female reporter named Susan Crabtree, who works for the Washington Examiner, a conservative online tabloid owned by rightwing billionaire Phillip Anschutz, referred to the president as “Obama” five times at a White House briefing while asking questions of Press Secretary Josh Earnest: a gesture of deliberate disrespect. (My guess is this was more about putting on a show for her boss than any personal animosity toward the president.)
Now we have Fox reporter James Rosen jerking around Earnest because, well, just because. I’m not sure why a White House reporter would chastise a presidential press secretary for not explicitly stating that a cop charged with murder is entitled to due process and a presumption of innocence. Maybe Rosen was having a bad day. Maybe he was striving to impress his bosses a la Crabtree. Or maybe he’s paranoid.
There’s a basis for this latter theory. According to Wikipedia, “On May 17, 2013, the Washington Post reported the United States Department of Justice had monitored Rosen’s activities by tracking his visits to the State Department, through phone traces, timing of calls and his personal emails. To obtain the warrants, the Justice Department labeled Rosen a ‘criminal co-conspirator’ with Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Attorney General Eric Holder personally signed off on the search warrant of Rosen, who was labeled a ‘flight-risk’ to keep from being informed of the ongoing surveillance. The Justice Department’s ‘aggressive investigative methods’ have caused various analysts to express concern their ‘investigative methods of classified leaks by government officials are having a chilling effect on news organizations’ ability to play a watchdog role’. Fox News contributor, Judge Andrew Napolitano, commented: ‘This is the first time that the federal government has moved to this level of taking ordinary, reasonable, traditional, lawful reporter skills and claiming they constitute criminal behavior.'” (Italics added, explained below.)
Maybe Earnest wasn’t aware of this history, and was caught flatfooted (although that’s hard to imagine), when Rosen decided to play by Baseball Rules (“if your pitcher hits our batter, our pitcher will hit one of your batters”) or, if you prefer, Mafia Rules (“if you whack one of your guys, we’ll whack one of yours, but don’t take it personally; it’s just business”). In any case, Earnest didn’t seem to take it personally, and treated it as “just business.”
Getting back to the Wikipedia article about Rosen. “Classified leaks.” Now there’s an interesting concept. This administration went after Bradley Manning and Eric Snowden for leaking classified stuff, too, so it’s not like they’re singling out reporters or even Fox reporters; they seem to dislike all leakers, period, although not as epically as Nixon did, but close. I almost sympathize with Rosen; I wouldn’t want Eric Holder bird-dogging me, either. But then I didn’t leak classified stuff. Even if I did, and Holder jerked me around because of it, I’m not sure I would choose the White House briefing room as a time and place to act out over it. I’d probably just send Holder or Obama a “f*** you” email or something.
An interesting question is whether this is developing into a pattern. To wit, have conservative reporters made an overt and conscious decision to be rude and snippy to the president’s official spokesman (and indirectly to the president, who’s obviously the real target of these jabs)? Two incidents in one week arguably is a pattern. Certainly, a lot of the conservative audience they’re playing to are rude and disrepectful about the president, and would gaily cheer them on. Or, at a deeper level, is there a conspiracy among conservative media types to delegitimize the Obama presidency by denying him the normal courtesies accorded to our head of state?
Nah, I don’t think so, they’re probably just being themselves.