Mad Bitch

A few weeks back Dana Milbank was complaining about Huffington Post blogger Nico Pitney getting a question at a Presidential press conference and even went so far as to call him a dick. This was of course all in the name of "journalistic integrity".

Today Milbank and his partner in crime Chris Cilliza released a video joking that our current Secretary of State and former first lady, Hillary Clinton, is a "Mad Bitch".



Hardy fuckin har.

Honestly I don't even want them to be fired or suspended. I want Milbank and Cilliza to be the straw that broke the Washington Post's back and brings them to full on financial ruin and collapse. That's what would happen in a just world.

How's THAT For "Staging"

I can't wait to hear what #dickwhisper has to say about this.

WASH. POST SELLING ACCESS?.... It's hardly a secret that newspapers, including the major dailies, have run into serious financial problems in recent years, and are frantically looking for new revenue streams. But if this report from Mike Allen is accurate, it seems the Washington Post's financial concerns have led the paper to consider a jaw-dropping scheme.

For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off the record, non-confrontational access to "those powerful few" — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper's own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health-care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels it's a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its "health care reporting and editorial staff."

Village VS The Blogosphere

Nico Pitney and Dana Milbank squared off today on David Kurtz's "Reliable Sources" show on CNN.



Notice as I mentioned last week, Dana Milbank still won't actually tell the audience what the question was because he knew that it would undermine his whole argument. And it looked like he wanted to gag when he had to admit that it was in fact a legitimate question. I can't say for sure that the audience would say Pitney got the better of the exchange because Milbank did what Villagers are most famous for, as soon as someone calls them out they point to another shiny object in the room. It went from being about the question and the process by which it came to be asked, to Milbank taking issue with what someone else on HuffPo which literally publishes hundreds if not thousands of columns every day, said to criticize him. And then he comes with a bullshit false equivalence hypothetical question. So maybe people at home watching thought it was a draw but for people who really are into politics and political writing I think Milbank just got exposed as a jealous hypcrite. At least from where I am sitting.

(h/t John Cole.

Update: Milbank made my point for me better than I ever could.

Per Nico Pitney:

The only thing that surprised me was when Dana turned to me after our initial sparring and called me a "dick" in a whispered tone (the specific phrase was, I believe, "You're such a dick").

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.

Yes He Is, Wait No He Isn't

Dana Milbank of the Washington Post has a column today entitled "Obama's Pressers: No Comment -- and NoDoz" about President Elect Barack Obama's refusal to answer any questions yesterday about the Rod Blagojevich scandal after his press conference. From reading the article one can only conclude that Milbank is a recent graduate of the Politico School of Journalism. I just have to wonder if ANYBODY actually reads their own articles nowadays before they are presented for publishing. You have to work really really hard to do the kind of 180 degree turn Milbank did in his article about whether or not Obama is treating the media like President Bush has, without getting a bad case of whiplash. Check the contradiction.

First he gives us this gem of a paragraph implying that Barack Obama is a Bush clone when it comes to the media. (And don't forget the sexist and thoroughly innapropriate skirt comment)

There's no denying Obama's team has an impressive starting five: Duncan (6-foot-5), incoming national security adviser James Jones and body man Reggie Love (both 6-foot-4) all played college basketball, while Attorney General-designate Eric Holder and U.N. Ambassador-designate Susan Rice played high school ball. But Obama's response to Blagojevich questions has been decidedly junior varsity. Begging off because of an ongoing investigation? Hiding behind Patrick Fitzgerald's skirt? Warning a reporter not to "waste" a question and asking for an alternative question? All four techniques were popularized by Bush.

But then a mere eight sentences later we get this insight implying that Obama is NOTHING like Bush when it comes to the media.

The charge may be premature. Obama has proved himself to be far more willing to take questions than Bush, and if he makes good on his promise to release the full account of his aides' Blagojevich ties -- even on Christmas Eve -- it will be a major improvement in transparency over the current administration.

So which is it Mr. Milbank? Is Barack Obama a Bush clone or is he the anti-Bush? People have debated for the last few weeks why the Big 3 auto makers are in financial distress but writing like Milbank's in this article illustrates to me EXACTLY why many of the major newspaper companies find themselves in a similar situation. And at this point because of that poor level of journalism I have little to no empathy for hacks like him.