Here's a headline I bet you thought you'd never see written by a liberal columnist: "How Sarah Palin Is Right About Washington."
Yet there it was at Monday's Bloomberg View written by none other than Margaret Carlson who most of you likely remember as one of the perilously liberal contributors to the old CNN political talk show Capital Gang:
We call it the “nerd prom,” hoping that a dose of irony will inoculate us. But there’s no use denying it: The White House Correspondents’ Association’s annual dinner is a deeply narcissistic event.
I realize I’m jumping on the bandwagon late here -- and any bandwagon that carries both Tom Brokaw and Sarah Palin is by definition crowded. This year it got so full that the current officers of the association started to sound like Miss America wishing for world peace: All they wanted to do, they said, was raise money for scholarships for aspiring journalists.
An inordinate amount of time was spent congratulating themselves for having raised more than $100,000 for journalism students. The return on investment is laughable. The weekend costs media organizations millions of dollars.
The emphasis on charity came after Brokaw elevated the criticism of the dinner by saying last year on “Meet the Press” that the evening reached a breaking point for him when Lindsay Lohan, invited by Fox News, became the night’s center of attention. Not unexpectedly, Sarah Palin chimed in this year on Twitter that we were a bunch of clowns throwing ourselves a “pathetic” party. [...]
The dinner descended from self- parody to self-loathing this year in its search for attention, inviting the cast of A&E’s “Duck Dynasty,” a show for those who like hunting fowl and hating Washington. By being the most ridiculous guests, they won the award for being most mentioned.
For those unfamiliar with Carlson, this bout of sanity and reason is rather rare. She's normally left-wing enough to be a regular contributor to MSNBC.
Which makes her agreeing with Palin - a seeming first from anyone in the media since the former Alaska governor became John McCain's running mate in August 2008 - all the more shocking.
Alas, her piece wasn't done leaving her time to descend into her more traditional brand of liberal absurdity: "More than anything else, what this weekend shows is that we in the news media have forgotten our mission to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."
That bears repeating: "we in the news media have forgotten our mission to afflict the comfortable."
To be fair, Carlson didn't coin this phrase originally attributed to the late American humorist and writer Finley Peter Dunne and copied ad nauseum ever since.
But for a so-called journalist to claim this today is sick-making. As the Washington Post's Jennifer Ruben observed Tuesday:
If there were a journalism trap door, Carlson should have fallen through it. No, no, no. She laughably confuses journalism — the obligation to report and enlighten — with share-the-wealth liberalism. Oh, how easily she does, and how revealing is it.
Indeed, this is the root of journalists’ bias and the key to understanding their inability to self-correct. They think their job is to help the poor and the downtrodden, rather than to tell the truth.
The truth? Since when has that been important to people such as Carlson?
There's only advocacy journalism today - truth be damned.
