Squeezin’ the Juice
by SVEA SAUER
There goes the store. Helen Thomas is gone from the Washington Press Corps, that sanctimonious, lilly-livered group that asks easy questions with pre-ordained answers. Helen Thomas had a mission to fulfill the purpose of journalism. Get the facts. Get them right. But above all, find out why.
We have all known Helen for so many years we are not surprised she let her feelings and opinions be known, not exactly a requirement of her job. For that she recently felt forced to resign, or was quietly fired. When you reach her age and years of experience you don’t have much patience left for the kind of squirrelly answers you get to intelligent questions.
I believe, in this instance, it was her insistence on having an answer to her questions about the motivation of terrorists, to which various answers were: hating the United States for our culture, the terrorists’ perversion of the Koran, our lack of communication of our noble aims, and other equally vapid reasons.
What Helen was reaching for was information about U.S. policy which has been justified as representing justice and progress. In answer to why we have not convinced the terrorists of this, she heard, “better communication.” Helen asks what, specifically, will we be communicating. Justice and progress are meaningless words without context.
If we had honest communication, I think people in the United States would understand why otherwise decent, law-abiding people are becoming more willing to strap on a bomb and kill themselves and others in a foolhardy attempt to prove why they feel so intensely, something the press has not yet been willing to do. Helen is not only willing but able and that is why she is gone.
Helen Thomas received numerous honors and was the only woman print reporter to go with Nixon on his historic trip to China. Of special delight to many women, she was the only reporter to have her own seat reserved in press conferences at the White House and to be asked to speak first.
The reporter who went to the big time in Washington D.C. never let her light go out. She was filled with the highest ambition, to be a journalist who would dig out the reasons as well as the facts. Anyone else would have been forgiven for a lapse in temper but she made the mistake of telling why the terrorists hate us. Not only because we have killed and displaced thousands of civilians, used torture, and favored their hated enemy Israel, but because this kind of truth-telling is always punished by society.
Yes, she had it coming, because that is the way of the world, but we will miss her more and more. She had become an institution we trusted.
