Heckling the President | Pierre Tristam

In a Rose Garden speech last week, President Obama announced the very sensible reversal of a long-standing American policy. People who entered the United States illegally when they were under 16, who’ve lived in the country for more than five years and are under 30, will no longer be deported. Rather, they’ll be granted work permits and, presumably, a way to citizenship, formalizing what they already do: attend college, hold jobs, pay taxes, and keep this country vibrant and true to its heritage.

The decision is worth debating, if there was room for that debate. It’s not just Congress that’s refused to engage it. Obama’s announcement was itself hijacked by a reporter who, five minutes through Obama’s nine-minute speech, heckled the president.

The reporter is Neil Munro, who works for the Daily Caller, a legitimate, D.C.-based online news-and-commentary website created by Tucker Carlson, the columnist and former co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, where interruptions were part of the show’s gimmickry.

The Rose Garden announcement was an Obama speech, not a press conference. He might have taken questions at the end. He might not. When presidents deliver speeches—or governors or county commissioners or aunt Hilda’s great-uncle at a bar mitzvah, for that matter—interruptions are not acceptable. Heckling even less so. Not even if the president being interrupted is Richard Nixon, which he never was during a speech, even in his decomposing phase during the summer of 1974.

Munro was not a reporter at that moment. He was a heckler, even though his question—“Mr. President, why do you favor foreign workers over Americans?”—while clearly baiting, was legitimate. As is ridiculing, lampooning, lambasting or even calling the president a liar, but in the proper context. Shouting it out during a State of the Union address, as Joe Wilson, the degraded South Carolina congressman, did three years ago, is adding insult to grandstanding. The attack on the president is of less consequence than the attack on the office, on the moment, on the process, of which Wilson is allegedly a part.

So it was with Munro. He wasn’t asking a question. He was grandstanding, effectively derailing the moment. He succeeded.

Carlson’s defense added to the ploy. He knows the difference between heckling and asking questions. He’s been to innumerable speeches and news conferences. He also knows the buttons to push to frame the debate his way: “He was doing what reporters are supposed to do — get their questions answered,” Carlson told Politico. “Presidents come out and they expect the press to act as stenographers — dutifully take down their every word and they retreat back into the White House. It’s very frustrating that they sit there every day and act … as politicians’ stenographer.”

Carlson is right. But he’s also being deceptive. He’s slurring journalism by equating means and ends, by erasing the difference between method and propriety.

No one is asking his reporter not to ask the tough questions. It takes audacity to crack the slime and reveal the slivers of truth politicians are occasionally capable of. But that’s what one-on-one interviews are for, or even news conferences, however phony and controlled those tend to be. Munro isn’t for that sort of grub. So he goes for a rhetorical Molotov cocktail.

And Carlson fuels it up, with superb effect. An “illegal” immigrant would have behaved more honorably.

Pierre Tristam is editor and publisher of FlaglerLive.com, a non-profit news service based in Palm Coast, Fl.

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