On Reliable Sources, Pitney responds to Milbank's accusation that question at Obama presser was "planted"
June 28, 2009 3:58 pm ET
From the June 28 edition of CNN's Reliable Sources:
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Media Matters: The Palin chronicles
The Friday Rush: A series of conflicts
Contrary to media hype, Sarah Palin is very unpopular
The Bush administration allowed James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, a "reporter" for a non-existent news service and former(?) gay prostitute, free run of the White House despite not subjecting him to the same routine background checks as other reporters.
The Bush administration also paid journalists to write stories favorable to the administration, which they did, without acknowledging that they'd been paid to do so.
Bush administration members, most notably Dick Cheney and his staff, fed lies to reporters like Judith Miller to stoke the outcry for a war with Iraq, and those reporters printed the lies without checking their veracity or offering a counterpoint in the name of "balance." (Balance is only for conservatives to comment on liberal ideas and initiatives, apparently.)
The mainstream media did NOTHING in the wake of these Bush administration manipulations of the media. Now I'm supposed to believe that Dana Milbank and Howie Kurtz are really outraged over the Obama administration's "collusion" with Pitney?
The sum and substance of this supposed manipulation was for someone on Obama's staff to tell Pitney to be prepared to ask a question if he got called the following day, because Obama wanted to highlight response in Iran to that country's recent election, and the Obama staff knew Pitney was in contact with Iranians involved in protesting the election results. They didn't feed Pitney a question, they didn't ask Pitney to tell them the question in advance so they could formulate a response, they didn't pay Pitney to report stories favorable to them, they didn't fail to perform a background check on Pitney and then give him access to the White House, they didn't lie to Pitney and then ask him to publish the lie. And yet the so-called liberal media is "outraged" at "collusion."
Given their track record, I don't see how Milbank, Kurtz, et. al. think they deserve to be taken seriously.
So then, after Obama's people asked him if he would pick one of the submitted questions to ask of Obama, he then put out feelers in more arenas, to get as large a pool of potential questions as possible.
And Milbank tried to change that to accuse Pitney of not having solicited questions until AFTER he was asked by Obama's staff! The whole reason Pitney was asked was because Obama's staff had read Pitney's request for questions from Iranians, but Milbank ignored the factual evidence to claim that Pitney's expanded search was his first search.
And then Milbank tries to smear Pitney with commentary from other Huffington Post writers, waving papers in Pitney's face, like something that someone else wrote reflects on Pitney's personal credibility?
And then Milbank tops it all off by calling Pitney a D1CK. It takes one to falsely accuse another.
Howie loves Dana!
i.e. Milbanks swimsuit question or the NY Times question to Obama about Alex Rodriguez.
Like so many on the right do, Milbank attacks the messenger, not the message.
So, how many appearances will Milbank make on Faux this week now that he was so "brave" to take on them evil libruls?
Instead of using it as a wakeup call that they have FAILED miserably at reporting the actual reality in an unbiased way they fight back in jealous rage!