The Audacity of Pitney

Last week during President Obama's presser, something kind of crazy happened. I noticed it at the time, but didn't think that it would become this big issue. Whoops.

For his second question of the presser, President Obama called upon Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney to ask a question. Pitney has been one of the best sources of raw information about what is happening in Iran and analysis of that information into something usable and understandable in the scheme of things. Having been in contact with actual Iranians in the middle of their crisis, Pitney had been accumulating questions directly from Iranians in the unlikely case he was called upon at the presser.

The Obama team was made aware of this, and informed Pitney the night before the presser that he may be called upon by the President to ask a question. Pitney then made a solicitation across various Farsi social networks to submit questions to him from Iranians, and in the case he was called upon he could ask a question from a person on the other side of the world who would NEVER have been able to ask it of the President of the United States.

So Pitney is called upon second, asks "his" question (and a doozie of a question it was, asking the President under what terms and conditions he would consider the Iranian government of Ahmadinejad legitimate enough to promote relations with), and the President does a pretty good job of dodging the question. But that's not the story.

The story is that there is traditionally a White House Press Corps pecking order of asking questions, beginning withe the wire services (AP, Reuters), to the network news, to the newspapers. As one can see, Nico Pitney and Huffington Post are not in this order, so to jump up to the second question after the AP is a little bit of a coup. At the same time, the AP's question was on Iran so it seemed like a good segway for Pitney to ask a question from an Iranian. And it was a good question. So no big deal, right?

Well, not for some, with conservative groups lambasting how this undermines the free press and that bloggers are partisan hacks (Thanks, by the way). The loudest of these critics has been Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. Milbank accuses the Obama administration and Pitney of working in cahoots, which is bad because:

"it sends a message to the world -- Iran included -- that the American press isn't as free as advertised."

He goes on to say how staged Obama's questions are, and how the press treats him so gently and with such empathy.

Wah wah. Pitney did his work, and because the medium he works through is open to all the Obama team picked up on it and thought that this was a good way to take advantage of the new media to do something a little unorthodox and outside the box that is Beltway media coverage. If the Administration had told Pitney to ask a certain question, then that's being staged. But they didn't - Obama could have called on him and he could have asked a question about health care or the President's smoking habits. Pitney, as a journalist, felt that asking a question about Iran from Iran was the best question he could ask. It was a good question too, remember, since the President had to use the five D's to get through it. So to refer to Pitney as some sort of hack blogger is just absurd.

And giving the question to a journalist who works in the same medium that has been so vitally important to the Iranian uprising I think says something too, that the Obama Administration recognizes that the world of media is going through a revolution. There are actually some superficial similarities that could be drawn between the media revolution and what is happening in Iran, most notably the use of the Internet as a medium to undermine the pretentious authority and elitism of the establishment. But that's for another post.

Ultimately, it looks more to me like there's a case of jealousy here. Seems like Adam Serwer (covering for TNC) of The American Prospect hits it right here:

"I'm not of the opinion that bloggers make old school shoe-leather reporters obsolete. Not by a long shot. But someone like Milbank? He's a rotary phone. And I think he knows it."

If you don't want this to happen again, MSM, then lose the sense of self-entitlement and start doing the kind of hard work and digging around that Pitney was doing to earn him his question.

UPDATE: Conor Clarke shows why the Right might want to not turn this into another "Liberal Media Conspiracy," and Yglesias thinks it's all about "status anxiety."