How feminist!
I missed this initially, because unlike an unfortunate number of people in the country, especially those in the government, I don’t tally up every event according to the gender, race and ethnicity of the participants.
However, it seems that in his year-ending news conference on December 19, President Obama only called on female reporters. The left-biased press rejoiced and applauded: Vanity Fair, for example, headlined its story “Obama’s All-Women Press Conference Deals Glancing Blow to Patriarchy.”
I am obviously so estranged from what passes for logic, fairness and ethics among Obama cheer-leaders that I can’t begin to comprehend their thinking. How could such a stunt possibly be anything but wrong?
1. Is the President making up for what he believed was his bias in calling on reporters in the past? If so, this like an umpire making up for mistakenly calling a ball a strike in one game making up for it by calling a strike a ball in another. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and two instances of gender bias don’t cancel each other out.
2. Is he making the assessment that the White House correspondents in the major news organizations are selected according to sexist criteria? How would he know? If there’s a legal case to make, he should make it: there are government agencies for that.
3. Or is this just a cute way of throwing a bone to the ladies, like “Bring Your Kids To School Day” makes children feel sooo special? How condescending and insulting to women, if so.
4. Does the President think that he’ll get easier questions from female reporters, since his support is much stronger with women voters? Again, that’s an insult to the professionals he called on.
5. Was he just using the press conference to shore up a core Democratic constituency? If so, is there anything Obama won’t manipulate for political gain?
6. Was he, as some suggested, doing this to stick it to the male reporters in the front row who usually ask him tough questions, like Ed Henry and Jonathan Karl? If so, how petulant and petty.
7. What is this, junior high school? Press conferences are important tool in keeping the public informed, and anything that distracts from that purpose is irresponsible. If gender bias is unethical, it’s unethical: there isn’t good gender bias and bad gender bias. The applauding from progressives suggest to me that they aren’t really interested in fairness and equality at all, just as many special benefits and advantages for their favored groups as they can get, regardless of the means.
This settles it for me. The questioners in Presidential Press Conferences need to be decided by lots, randomly drawn, ideally by a non-partisan marsupial.
Ethics Alarms 
A marsupial as the mascot for the unbiased. That is genius!
Thank you! I was wondering if I was nuts! This ( with a title similar to what you posted) was shared all around Facebook with much crowing and woo-hooing by the ladies, the President taking on the Patriarchy. I was thinking that it must have been a pretty lackluster press conference for nothing but this to come out of it. It seems so patronizing, but it was received with a lot of enthusiasm.
I find the positive reactions very depressing.
Oh, they are depressing, all right. I see posts from roughly 50 women a day on FB and I saw little questioning of Obama’s actions, but lots of applause. This is what feminism is now, not equality but putting one over on men, “winning”. If it were about equality, you wouldn’t see all the crowing going on in response to statistics pointing out that there are fewer men in college, or that male unemployment is higher, or that the President took only questions from female reporters. The other frightening thing ( to me anyway) is how Obama supporters cannot see any problem with his actions, ever! He can do no wrong. Anyone who criticizes him is racist, or has a screw loose. There’s no talking to them.
When I watched the news conference I saw the pattern and thought it highly discriminatory against males. Later, Ed Henry, when asked about it he shrugged it off saying that the last press conference only men were called on and it was the nature of the game at times. I’ll take him at his word.
Nonetheless, the questions posed were such softballs, given all that is going on in the world, it seems that the president was not about to talk about anything more serious than his golf handicap and what he wants for Christmas. That is the problem – not that he called on only women reporters who would gleefully engage in his witty repartee. He did not call on any well respected female reporters either.
If the feminists (male and female) really want to make inroads into this arena then they should start asking serious questions with challenging follow up questions.
I’m not surprised that Ed Hendry shrugged it off. In the end, what is going to change? Hard questions or soft, from male or female, it will still be met with the usual evasion and double talk. If Obama is going to play these silly games, he might as well call a conference attended only by grade schoolers. Maybe some precocious kid can pin him down on something where his elders have thus far either failed or declined to try.