Friday, April 10, 2015

Rand Paul's war on women journalists

Oy. So Rand Paul had a bad morning on the TV, when he got testily obnoxious and all mansplaining about how to do journalism with Savannah Guthrie. "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no," he screeched at her. "Listen, you've editorialized. Let me answer a question. You ask a question, and you say, 'Have your views changed?' instead of editorializing and saying my views have changed."
In a later interview, Paul further explains how journalists are allowed to cover him.
In an interview in New Hampshire with The New York Times, after the appearance on "Today," Mr. Paul said he gets tired of questions with the built-in premise that he has contradicted himself. Questions, he said, like "'O.K., well we understand that you've been beating your wife for years and you've flip-flopped on 25 different issues and you used to believe this and you used to believe that,'" he said. "That isn't journalism."
Funny thing is, when it was Sean Hannity asking about the same flip-flops, Paul didn't blow up. He answered. Lamely, but he answered. So Hannity asking about the same things as Guthrie must have been journalism, while Guthrie asking about it was "editorializing." You could chalk it up to the fact that it was Hannity and Fox News, or you could look at Paul's previous testy interactions with female journalists. Like when CNBC's Kelly Evans asked him about a tax incentive proposal he came up with for U.S. companies to bring their overseas profits back to the United States and about his position on vaccination.  READ MORE

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