Scoop Of The Century At Yahoo! News: Jay Carney Is A Press Secretary!

Now that "Obama is terrible" has taken hold as the dominant media narrative of this instant, expect to see a lot more stories like this one:  "The top 9,486 ways Jay Carney won’t answer your questions (interactive)" . Yes, "interactive," which means "We embedded a scrolly thing of Jay Carney's press conference transcripts with some words highlighted." Oh Yahoo! News, you path-breaking new media juggernaut, you! What's next, a dancing baby? Well, here's yr Wonkette's EXCLUSIVE stop press bombshell: this article is useless.

For one thing, the writers obviously did a decent amount of work tallying all the times Carney has said something like "I'll get back to you" or "I don't have the answer," but do they actually make this information useful and intelligible by comparing Carney's evasiveness to past presidential press secretaries? Of course not! Because they would likely find that Carney is no better or worse than anyone who has held his job in the past, and then there's no point to the article except "Jay Carney is a press secretary."

And if you're into "next level shit," consider that even if the article had used their counting method to compare Carney to, say, Ari Fleischer, that still would not be enough to tell us who's actually more evasive. In other words, maybe Ari Fleischer did not explicitly say "I don't have the answer" quite as much, but avoided questions in other ways. For example:  

Q: Any reaction to the new elected President of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos? Is your government is expecting a solution to the problem by February 28th?

MR. FLEISCHER: Let me see if we have anything specific on Cyprus, and we'll post that.

Or this, which is a lot of words that are not "Yes," or "No," or "I don't know," but which nevertheless does not at all answer the question:

Q: Is there anything the President can point to as a sign of progress that that diplomatic approach [to North Korea] is working -- since it's been several months now.

MR. FLEISCHER: Well, I think the President understands -- and so do the nations in the region -- that when you make the decision to pursue diplomacy, diplomacy takes time. And time is not in North Korea's favor. North Korea has a very backward economy. North Korea has people who are starving. North Korea deserves -- the people of North Korea deserve their place among the other nations of the world with a good future, an economy that grows and advances.

And all you need to do is take a look at the tremendous difference between South Korea's progress and North Korea's progress. And they both started out at the same point after the Korean War. And South Korea, because of the government that it has, the democracy that it has, has been able to feed its people, and have a booming economy that provides jobs and opportunities. Now, North Korea -- there's a novel that was written some time ago called, "Time Forward" -- in North Korea it's Time Backward.

Viewed in this light, maybe we should be thanking Jay Carney for being straightforward when he doesn't know something or doesn't want to comment or refers the reporter to the Ministry of Silly Walks. Transparency, right? Guys? Eh we tried.

One other stupid thing from the article: "In 1,383 cases he referred a question to someone else. But will he at least speculate on hypotheticals? No. In fact, he has refused to do so 525 times." Ha, funny writing Yahoo! scribes, but you can't seriously be implying that Jay Carney should know everything that every part of the government is doing at all times, right? or that it would be better if he just made stuff up when he didn't know an answer? And holy shit, do you really expect Jay Carney to "speculate on hypotheticals?" We are not experts, but that strikes us as a good way for Jay Carney to get himself fired. Yahoo! News, will you answer these questions? Or would you like to refer us to go fuck ourselves?

[ Yahoo! News ]