PBS anchor tweets ‘Take that, Bibi’ in gloat over Iran deal

Gwen Ifill, a woman who relies on you to earn her living as a PBS news anchor, got a chiding this week after using her Twitter account to seemingly gloat over President Obama’s Iran deal.

Ifill had tweeted “Take that, Bibi” in a post in which she shared a White House infographic outlining how much more peaceful the world had become with the inking of the deal. It drew immediate criticism from people whose Iran/Israel ideology took a back seat to their shock at such an opinionated and partisan position coming from a PBS journalist.

PBS took notice, too, and excoriated her on its own website. But, of course, the chiding she received was about as toothless as they come. PBS ombudsman Michael Getler, an “independent internal critic,” wrote a blog post that sounded plenty harsh — but that ultimately has no effect on Ifill’s working life or on her responsibility to viewers.

At least his words betray a heart that seems to be in the right place:

So that brings me to the real self-inflicted wound, which was a tweet by PBS NewsHour co-anchor Gwen Ifill on Wednesday — after it became known that President Obama had secured the necessary number of Democratic backers in the Senate to ensure that the nuclear agreement with Iran could not be blocked by opponents — that said: “Take that, Bibi.” That was a reference, of course, to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has strongly opposed the agreement and came to Washington at the invitation of Republican House Majority Leader John Boehner to argue against it in front of Congress.

Getler asked Ifill about why she posted such a thing, and she told him she wasn’t sharing her own sentiment. Rather, she said, she was simply sharing what she presumed to be the official White House attitude.

Getler wasn’t buying it.

“One would have to lean way over backwards to give her the benefit of the doubt that she was simply shedding light on the administration’s view of portions of Netanyahu’s arguments,” he wrote. “But to personalize it by saying, ‘Take that, Bibi’ is, in my book, inexcusable for an experienced journalist who is the co-anchor of a nightly news program watched by millions of people over the course of any week.”

That’s great and all, but it’s too bad that Getler’s power within PBS is limited only to the power of the pen. Life for Ifill will go on with no real repercussions.

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