If you want to see a good example of a reporter/critic who’s grown fat and sassy in his job and has been reduced to phoning it in, take a good look at Tom Shales:

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The Pulitzer-Prize winning TV critic was once one of the brightest bylines in the Post’s Style section, but like anyone who’s stayed too long in a job (Shales began at the Post in 1972 and became TV critic five years later), he’s pretty much condemned to an endless rehash of previously expressed opinions and long-held beliefs. The only thing that’s changed is that he — like, apparently, every other writer on the Post — has come out of the journalist’s “impartial” ideological closet and now feels free to opine about all sorts of things.

Case in point, this crack, which comes at the end of his professional obit of Larry King, the Methuselah of talk-show hosts who recently announced he was hanging ‘em up on CNN. After spending the bulk of his column on his assessment of King’s career — arguing the strange theory that King wasn’t loud, boorish or attitudinal enough to compete in the modern era of Confrontation TV, instead of the more reasonable assumption that King had simply run out of gas after 25 years — Shales pulls the following rabbit out of his hat:

Not that every person who helms a talk show on these networks is guilty of coarsening the conversation. But the big noises, the most prominent personalities, seem also to be the most shrill and hostile. They set the standard, substandard though it may be.

And what happens on television invariably affects — and sometimes infects — American life, manners and mores. In March, Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) was shocked to be jeered and vilified by anti-health-care-reform demonstrators on Capitol Hill who used the most vile of racial epithets when screaming at him.

“It surprised me,” Lewis said afterward, “that people are so mean, and we can’t engage in a civil dialogue and debate.”

If he’d watched more cable TV, Lewis might not have been quite so surprised.

What?


Leaving aside for the moment the out-of-left-field cheap shot as the column’s kicker, the incendiary “n-word” allegations have essentially been debunked, as you can read here, here and here and here. Andrew Breitbart has offered $100,000 to anyone who can produce indisputable evidence that racial epithets were hurled at Rep. John Lewis and others during the emotional protests against the health-care bill on March 20. So far, no takers.

So why did Shales, barely able to reach from his La-Z Boy recliner to spin his his handy newspaperman’s Lazy Susan for a choice metaphor, come up with this particular one?

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Because, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, he not only wants to believe — wants to believe the worst of his fellow citizens, of the Tea Partiers and of Americans who disagree with him and his bien-pensant Beltway buddies — he has to believe it.

For if it’s not true — and it isn’t — then part of his carefully constructed fantasy world comes crashing down: the part that attributes only ill will to his political opponents, and refuses to accept that they are anything other than what the Left says they are: racists.

The Congressional Black Caucus deliberately fanned the flames of race hatred with its baseless accusations (tailor-made to fit the pre-existing journalistic narrative), and even though his own newspaper has long since walked back the charges, Shales continues carry their water.

Shame on you, Tom.