The Mole That Roared

Paul Farhi, the once great Washington Post  Bezos Bugle's media critic, has a feature article today about whether the "media-briefing battles between [White House press secretary] Jay Carney and ABC's Jon Karl" are benefiting anyone.  Farhi catalogs some of the more noteworthy dust-ups between the two and concludes that the confrontations are emblematic of a format that sheds more heat than light on topics of the day.  Well, yeah.  But throughout his pearl-clutching, Farhi never gets to the reason why Karl is the biggest dick in a briefing room full of dicks.

All you need to know about Jonathan Karl is right here:

Karl came to mainstream journalism via the Collegiate Network, an organization primarily devoted to promoting and supporting right-leaning newspapers on college campuses (Extra!, 9-10/91)—such as the Rutgers paper launched by the infamous James O’Keefe (Political Correction, 1/27/10). The network, founded in 1979, is one of several projects of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, which seeks to strengthen conservative ideology on college campuses. William F. Buckley was the ISI’s first president, and the current board chair is American Spectator publisher Alfred Regnery. Several leading right-wing pundits came out of Collegiate-affiliated papers, including Ann Coulter, Dinesh D'Souza, Michelle Malkin, Rich Lowry and Laura Ingraham (Washington Times, 11/28/04).

There's a lot more at that link that paints Karl as a fairly obvious Republican mole in the press corps.  He's notorious for being caught parroting Republican talking points during the Benghazi! phony e-mail flapdoodle.  So, are we shocked that someone in the media is a right-winger?  Hardly (see: Fox "News").  But, when the story's about someone who's essentially a political operative who happens to have a press badge, let's have his/ her professional pedigree at least be mentioned, ok?