Schooled

You gotta love this explanation for Obama's Friday get-out-of-town presser last week where he called on only female reporters..

I thank President Obama for the "teachable" and empathy building moment. The question is, moving forward, what are we going to do about this in our workplaces, classrooms and communities?

Obviously this "diversity coach" needs some education on Chicago politics. The White House press room is full of female reporters who get called on during every press conference, including April Ryan from National Urban Radio, to whom Obama seemed to go off-script and give the last question.

The AP, Reuters, CNN, PBS, New York Times, Real Clear Politics, Washington Times, and several other media outlets routinely send female reporters to the briefings and presidential press conferences and they do get called on.  Good Lord, for years the matriarch of the press room was this lady, who had to be called on or else.  


If one were in a snippy mood one could ask why there haven't been more opportunities overall for all reporters, male and female, especially ahead of important elections.   Or one could ask why one major network ranked well behind the others in getting questions at all. 

But digressing aside, the diversity coach seems so mixed up in fantasy between presidential adoration and gender issues she can't begin to understand what a press conference is all about.  As mentioned by others, the questions he received from the 8 print/radio reporters didn't really get any important topics fully addressed, which becomes a disservice to the public for whom reporters supposedly work.  It's not as if ongoing domestic unrest, a cyber attack, and continuing conflicts with Putin and ISIS, Obamacare signup numbers and the 'end' to the war in Afghanistan (coming next week) somehow don't matter. 

And therein lies the real teachable moment--a president and his staff figuring out a way to dodge those important questions they knew would be raised by the legacy TV media while simultaneously leaving the impression that anyone who dare raise a question about the all-female strategy might be a bigot or mysogonist.  If there's any schooling to be done here it needs to be to flow to people like the CNN op-ed writer or various other "Grubers" who think a presidential press conference should be about celebrating diversity rather than speaking truth to power.