By: Greg Mitchell It was debated on the blogosphere and on news sites for several days and fully broke on TV Sunday morning via a segment on Howard Kurtz's CNN media program: The so-called "planted" question at President Obama's press conference last week.
In brief: Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post had been blogging all week about the crisis in Iran, drawing huge traffic and attention with rapid reports and links, and with sources inside Iran at a time when Western media was in a lockdown. Someone from the White House contacted him and said the president might well call on him the next day (he's called on bloggers before). Pitney then asked his Iranian sources to provide the question.
The next day he was, indeed, called on, second, at the presser. The question turned out to be a tough one, about whether Obama would recognize the election and if he felt this would send a wrong signal to protesters there.
Criticism soon appeared from both mainstream reporters (jealous?) and conservative bloggers. They all charged that the fix was in and some accused Obama of setting up the question. In fact, he did not know the question, just that it would relate to Iran and come from someone inside that country. The critics also were put in the position of blasting a question from an Iranian, which normally they would hail.
Anyway: One of the chief critics was Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, so Kurtz put him together with Pitney for his show. A bitter battle ensued. Off mike, according to Pitney, Milbank even cursed him. Kurtz denies this.
To see the video go now to the E&P Pub via
this link.
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