Politico Reporter Accused of Flacking For FLOTUS

Politico reporter Amie Parnes is a watchdog, but not in the traditional journalistic sense. Critics say Parnes is a vigilant protector of Michelle Obama’s public image, a beat reporter who acts as a press agent for the official she covers.

According to a story by Matthew Boyle, at dailycaller.com, Parnes’s fawning coverage of the first lady has inspired Betsy Rothstein of FishbowlDC.com to launch a “Parnes-o-Meter,” which ranks Parnes’s pieces about Michelle Obama on a scale of 1 to 10 kisses. “People have asked me, over and over again, for the past three weeks, ‘Why do you hate Amie Parnes? Why do you have such a personal thing against her?’” Rothstein told The Daily Caller. “The fact is that I’ve never met her. I don’t know her and this isn’t personal. It’s totally professional. I’ve watched her work, I’ve read her work, day in and day out, and there is never anything, not even slightly, critical of the first lady. It’s absurd coverage. As a media reporter, I don’t know how I couldn’t point that out.”

Parnes’s latest piece, which ran as the lead story on Politico’s website last Friday, frames the first lady as a victim of conservative attacks from figures like Andrew Breitbart, Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, Rep. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin. This criticism from the right, Parnes suggests, is hard to understand, given that Michelle has spent the last two years “primarily focusing on childhood obesity, military families and the arts.” Parnes makes no mention of the first lady’s many and varied political activities. She does point out that, “for conservative critics, it is open season on the first lady.”

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