Conspicuously Absent

As shitty a job as our mainstream media is doing at actually bringing us the news, its amazing the sense of entitlement and territorialism they still harbor towards anyone who they see as below them.

Such is the case with the media's faux poutrage over President Obama calling on Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney at Tuesday's presser. Nevermind that President Obama did nothing to hide the fact of WHY he was calling on Pitney.

THE PRESIDENT: Nico, I know that you, and all across the Internet, we've been seeing a lot of reports coming directly out of Iran. I know that there may actually be questions from people in Iran who are communicating through the Internet. Do you have a question?

You can't get much more transparent than that.

Yet and still the masters of the universe, in their own minds at least, were mortally offended that President Obama would dare pick a lowly blogger (who just so happened to have been changing the game with his coverage of the situation/revolution in Iran with new media) rather one of the their annointed bretheren. So they decide to make it into some kind of a faux outrage full of false equivalences. They want to make this situations some how akin to President George W. Bush's ACTUAL long term White House Press Core plant "Jeff Gannon"

James Dale Guckert (born 1957) posed as a conservative columnist under the pseudonym Jeff Gannon and was given credentials as a White House reporter between 2003 and 2005, eventually being employed by the news organization Talon News during the latter part of this period. Gannon first gained national attention during a presidential press conference on January 26, 2005, when he asked United States President George W. Bush a question that some in the press corps considered "so friendly it might have been planted."[1] Gannon routinely obtained daily passes to White House briefings, attending four Bush press conferences and appearing regularly at White House press briefings. Although he did not qualify for a Congressional press pass, Gannon was given daily passes to White House press briefings "after supplying his real name, date of birth and Social Security number."[2] Gannon came under public scrutiny for his lack of a journalistic background prior to his work with Talon[3][4] and his involvement with various homosexual escort service websites using the professional name "Bulldog". Gannon resigned from Talon News on February 8, 2005. Continuing to use the name Gannon, he has since created his own official homepage and worked for a time as a columnist for the Washington Blade newspaper, where he confirmed he was gay after he was outed as a homosexual prostitute.[5]

Now so far I have seen at least 3 columns in major MSM newspapers framing this situations as some kind of scandal or bad idea for the White House. I won't excerpt from them but you can read CBS's Mark Knoller's offering here, The Washington Post's Dana Millbank's offering here, and the New York Times' Kate Phillips offering here. They have two things in common.

1. They all come off look like whiny little bitches.

2. They do not include the text of the question which is the subject of the columns.

How in the hell can you try to call out the President for having a "media plant" asking him a question without including the actual question? Isn't that, like, a major part of the story? And are we supposed to believe its a coincidence that none of these three columns included the text of the question?

Sorry, not buying it.

Lets look at the question itself.

Q: Yes, I did, I wanted to use this opportunity to ask you a question directly from an Iranian. We solicited questions last night from people who are still courageous enough to be communicating online, and one of them wanted to ask you 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 what the demonstrators there are working towards?

Now that my friends is what you call the OPPOSITE of a softball question. Add in the fact that it was a question offered from an Iranian suffering through the government's crackdown in Iran and you would have to say it was at least one of, if not THE, most important question of the presser. Yet the mainstream media prima donas don't even think the question was worth referring to.

One has to wonder why.

Is it because they know that if a reader were to actually see the question and realize that it wasn't a softball and that it was legitimate that they would quickly lose interest in these assholes' hurt feelings?

I know my answer to the question, you are welcome to weigh in with your own.

Here is how Mark Knoller responded to my queries about it on Twitter.

his question wasn't the story. the WH arrangements for him to ask his question was the story.

Now what did those arrangements consist of? Did they fly him cross country? Did they give him an alias and a cover story as Bush did with gay male prostitute/media plant James Guckert/Jeff Gannon?

Nope. They just called him and said they "might" call on him for a question.

The sad thing is I normally enjoy Knoller's work. But this is what we call where I am from, a bitch move.

And no matter how they try to make it into something else it all comes down to Pitney getting an opportunity that they didn't get. Shame on President Obama for recognizing a person who was doing the job of reporting on Iran better than the rest of the establishment bums.

Nah, shame on the haters for giving up their journalistic integrity to lash out at the White House because they feel "disrespected".

If you don't like it I have a solution for you.

DO YOUR DAMN JOB BETTER.

That is all.