impudent reporter put in her place

Dana Milbank reports on a stupid, unnecessary, and heated exchange between “reporter” Peggy Fox and candidate George Allen about Allen’s “heritage” (he’s rumored to descend from Jews):

At a debate in Tysons Corner yesterday between Republican Allen and Democrat Webb, WUSA-TV’s Peggy Fox asked Allen, the tobacco-chewing, cowboy-boot-wearing son of a pro football coach, if his Tunisian-born mother has Jewish blood.

“It has been reported,” said Fox, that “your grandfather Felix, whom you were given your middle name for, was Jewish. Could you please tell us whether your forebears include Jews and, if so, at which point Jewish identity might have ended?”

Allen recoiled as if he had been struck. His supporters in the audience booed and hissed. “To be getting into what religion my mother is, I don’t think is relevant,” Allen said, furiously. “Why is that relevant — my religion, Jim’s religion or the religious beliefs of anyone out there?”

“Honesty, that’s all,” questioner Fox answered, looking a bit frightened.

“Oh, that’s just all? That’s just all,” the senator mocked, pressing his attack. He directed Fox to “ask questions about issues that really matter to people here in Virginia” and refrain from “making aspersions.”

“Let’s move on,” proposed the moderator, George Stephanopoulos of ABC News.***

Questioned later, Fox said she was totally taken aback by Allen’s reaction to her question.

“I was shocked,” she said after the event. Disclosing that her great-grandfather was a Mormon polygamist, she added: “Why would he get so angry at the suggestion there might be something in your background that’s Jewish? I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all.”

Yet she makes clear that her motive was to dig up something Allen had been “denying” and to confront him with it. She refers to this as “curiosity.”

Fox said her motive was curiosity. “I thought it was important to find out is this part of his heritage, because if it is nobody knows it. Do you deny part of your heritage for political reasons?”

Has it come down to this?—that reporters play Gotcha! with politicians’ religion?

It has now gotten to the point where I cannot stand to watch

Why do “reporters” continue to debase themselves, their profession, and the rest of us with their childish, surly, entitled, grotesque behavior?

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***I note from watching This Week that Stephanopoulos is often the first to try to avoid sticky subjects. Two Sundays ago, for example, he cut off Katrina VandenHeuvel at the knees when she announced that the administration and Republican politicians must face a “reckoning” over their support for “torture,” a position that is decreasing the moral stature of the U.S. (no free transcript available, and I’m not shelling out money for it).

 Before the words were out of her mouth, Stephanopoulos said that the politicians would face a reckoning at the polls in November—which is exactly the right attitude and answer.

Enough with the witch-hunting! But I fear they’re just getting started, with the election two full years away…