Last night Kevin alluded to yesterday’s lame Julie Mason column about how the Washington DC press corps doesn’t care for White House spokesman Tony Snow — a topic of dubious news-value.
The lameness started right off the bat:
White House spokesman Tony Snow made a startling claim earlier this month, one that shed some light on changing perceptions about the job he’s doing.
During a briefing, Snow responded to a question about climate change by noting that, “We’re talking about nuclear development, which is now championed by, among others, Greenpeace.”
Beg your pardon?
“I think there’s some Greenpeace people who are certainly advocates of nuclear power,” Snow said.
As whoppers go, that was a good one. Certainly, it was news to Greenpeace.
“Golly, you know, I can’t believe the White House would get that wrong,” said Jim Riccio, Greenpeace nuclear policy analyst. “Greenpeace was founded as an anti-nuclear organization, and we have been fighting nuclear weapons and their evil offspring, nuclear power, ever since.”
White House reporters don’t expect much from Snow, which goes part of the way toward explaining why his claim about Greenpeace went largely unremarked.
Perhaps it went largely unremarked because many folks knew immediately what Snow was referencing, albeit rather inarticulately if Mason’s quote is accurate — the pro-nuclear energy stance of Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore who is no longer a member of the activist group:
In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That’s the conviction that inspired Greenpeace’s first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.
It seemed incredibly strange that an inside-the-beltway journalist like Mason was clueless about what Snow meant, but a quick jog over to Mason’s Chron.com blog shows that apparently she wasn’t so clueless after all:
The White House column in the paper today looked at changing attitudes — mostly among the press corps — about Tony Snow. People ask all the time, “What do you guys think of him?” The column was a status report.
The piece described a recent claim by Snow that Greenpeace supports nuclear power. It was a sloppy mistake on Snow’s part — he was probably thinking of Patrick Moore, a former Greenpeace leader who left in 1986 and now works for the nuclear power industry, among others.
Aha. So in her blog she gets it, but in her column she plays completely dumb. Why?
Then at the end of her blog post she wants us to know that reporters don’t write headlines, which means she must have gotten some grief for her column’s headline, “Is White House spokesman the ‘most useless’ one ever?” She may not have written the headline, but her column provided the fodder for it:
At a forum this week at the National Press Club featuring Snow and a group of White House correspondents, a New York Times reporter half-jokingly called Snow “the most useless press secretary ever.”
We’ve long made our own case that the Chron’s DC bureau is the “most useless” DC bureau ever. We haven’t changed our minds.
RELATED BLOGVERSATION: For Whom The Bell Tolls? It Tolls For Thee, Washington Bureau Chiefs. (Hugh Hewitt)
