This Yahoo News analysis showing that White House spokesman Jay Carney did not answer 9,486 questions posed to him by the White House Press Corps is not a blight on Carney’s record; it is a blight on the record of a lapdog media that allows him to persistently get away with not answering questions.
No, the media cannot make Carney answer questions, but they certainly have the power to make the White House pay a political price for this behavior, which would help to put a stop to it.
A Yahoo News analysis of the 444 briefings that Carney has held since becoming White House press secretary has identified 13 distinct strains in the way he dodges a reporter’s question. Since Carney held his first daily briefing with reporters in the White House Brady Press Briefing Room on Feb. 16, 2011, for example, he’s used some variation of “I don’t have the answer” more than 1,900 times. 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.
In the following interactive, you can browse all 9,486 of Carney’s most-used responses and verbal crutches.
This is more proof of the media’s ongoing abusive love affair with this president. No matter how many times he lies to them, snoops into their telephone calls, seizes their emails, or fails — the media always manage to rally to defend, deflect, ignore, play down, and attack the opposition in order to protect The Precious.
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