Jonathan Chait on the Helen Thomas myth:
Thomas didn't ask tough questions and she didn't hold the press to account. She spent decades as a wire service stenographer. In the latter years of her career, she alternated between collecting awards at an astonishing pace -- none of them mentioning her utterly unmemorable work -- and launching left-wing broadsides at press secretaries... If Thomas helped anybody, it was Republicans who endlessly repeated clips of her questioning in order to suggest that the entire press corp was filled with openly hostile left-wing ideologues. It certainly served no journalistic purpose. The way you hold a president to account is by uncovering information, not by hurling insults at his spokesman