Why the Village is so mad at Nico Pitney
June 25, 2009 8:39 am ET by Eric Boehlert
I think Matthew Cooper, writing at The Atlantic, comes awfully close to the truth with this observation [emphasis added]:
Besides, the Iranian who posed the question via Pitney offered up one a lot smarter question than some of the eyerollers offered by other reporters like, did you speak out on Iran because of Lindsay Graham and John McCain (CBS News's Chip Reid) or (Fox News's Major Garrett) What took you so long?
Meaning, does it surprise anyone that the Washington Post's Dana Milbank was among the Villagers shrieking the loudest about Pitney's presence in the White House briefing room, and that Milbank writes a column for the Post which, week in and week out, is nearly uniformly lacking in substance?
Does it surprise anyone that people like Milbank, who for professional reasons prefer to have a White House press corps that obsesses over trivia and process, was among the scribes most insulted when an online writer breached the Village gate and asked a deeply substantive question?
As Media Matters noted, Milbank wrote an entire column belittling Pitney's press questions and mocking the "prepackaged entertainment" of the Obama presser. But oops, Milbank forgot to tell readers what Pitney actually asked. In other words, Milbank ignored the substance. He was only interested in the process.
FYI, the question (via an Iranian) was this: "Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn't that a betrayal of the -- of what the demonstrators there are working towards?"
After years appearing on Countdown With Keith Olbermann, Dana Milbanks quoted Barack Obama out of context to make him appear as if he was some kind of savior. When Keith Olbermann challenged his quote to appear in full context so that the quote wasn't misinterpreted he has refused to appear on his show and now leaves permanently as a guest.
Milbank is a clown and it's clear why he and the rest of the "reporters" were miffed that Nico Pitney got a questions and a dam good one to boot. Yes, the stupid, TMZ, Hardcopy questions are exactly why Obama gets annoyed with them. Their idiots! Rock on Nico!
From DP:
Did President Barack Obama play a rigged game at a press conference Tuesday on the issue of Iran, which he has struggled with in recent days?
White House aides apparently invited a senior news editor from the left-leaning Huffington Post website to come to the Tuesday news conference with a question that had been submitted online from an Iranian. Aides gave the blogger, Nico Pitney, a guest pass and escorted him into the briefing room.
After taking a single question from The Associated Press, Obama announced, "I know Nico Pitney is here from the Huffington Post."
"I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet," Obama said, according to The Washington Post's Dana Milbank. "Do you have a question?"
"That's right," Pitney said, "I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian." He then went on to ask what Milbank called an "arranged question."
Pitney contends the question was not staged.
Traditional media journalists need to realize their turf is changing as the media changes and that bloggers are being given, and should be given, more access.
But there is no excuse for planted or pre-arranged questions.
As Milbank noted, "The use of planted questions is a no-no at presidential news conferences, because it sends a message to the world — Iran included — that the American press isn't as free as advertised."
The longtime Washington journalist rightly noted that Huffington Post bloggers and other liberal outlets accused President Bush of planting questioners at news conferences with pre-planned questions.
At a time when Iranians are being killed and beaten for demanding democracy, we ought to be extra careful to demonstrate our commitment to our founding principles.
We hope President Obama regrets what appeared to be a stunt, and rejects any future temptation to plant questions.
Every President that I know of has called reporters beforehand, told them that they might be called on, and to be ready with a question. Obama does it (I'm sure others in the pressroom have received calls from staffers before, or even the Press Sec), Bush did it, Clinton did it, Bush I did it, and I'm sure Reagan did it.
Where you go over the line, is if you know the question before. Obama didn't.
Perhaps, Obama's gesture had something to do with uneasiness over letting Pitney swim alone for too long in the "shark" tank. Or it could be Obama was anxious to try something different; recently he's seemed impatient with some of the more insipid questions posed to him during press conferences.
I'm sixty years old, was an anti-war protestor in the US during the Viet-nam war and have been supremely disappointed, many times in my life, by American media.
It is a new day, there are new players and lots of room for improvement. As we said in the Sixties - "let the sun shine in."
P.S. Since when does observing the groundrules for pressers equate with demonstrating our commitment to our founding principles? IMO that's a little over the top, eh?