USATODAY.com - NBC's chief confident on 'Today,' Brian Williams vs. Couric: "Thomas takes on her peers
. . .White House legend Helen Thomas, the longtime United Press International reporter who is now a syndicated columnist for Hearst, takes aim at her colleagues in a new book, saying that when it came to questioning President Bush in the weeks before the Iraq war, they were more lapdogs than watchdogs.
'I ask myself every day why the media have become so complacent, complicit and gullible,' Thomas writes in Watchdogs of Democracy? (Scribner, $25), due in bookstores this week. 'It all comes down to the 9/11 terrorist attacks that led to fear among reporters of being considered 'unpatriotic' or 'un-American.' '
In an interview, Thomas didn't back down from her thesis but allowed that the White House press corps 'became a little more courageous' in hitting Bush and his spokesmen with tougher questions after Hurricane Katrina. 'That was a turning point. They saw with their own eyes the incompetence. . .'"
The incompetence was there long before, but Katrina did make it impossible to ignore.
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