Bloggers question taken by White House

Yet another example of the "old guard" rejecting new ideas. I support the president on this one. I think if anything, this was less staged than usual than the usual question, certainly not more so. The only thing that the president knew about this question in advance was that it wasn't going to be an easy one, and he took it, not just despite that, but because of it. I respect that.

I hope Obama continues to do things like this.

This is still a concern because President Obama's press and other outlets are becoming more and more staged and a "show" not news.

At least President Bush would let reporters have at it and ask what ever they wanted even when he got a freaking shoe thrown at him! But he didn't go into scripted everything.

Now this actually started with supreme control and handling all during Obama's campaign. And has only gotten more and more controlled. Never in America has a president been like this.

From the article:
President Obama called on Nico Pitney, a blogger for the left-leaning Huffington Post, in an orchestrated move during Tuesday’s news conference. As Kate Phillips outlined on The New York Times’s Caucus blog, Mr. Pitney has been writing extensively about the protests in Iran and soliciting questions from Iranians, so the White House asked him to come to the news conference so the president could call on him and address an inquiry forwarded from an Iranian.

The move generated complaints from Mr. Obama’s critics about the staging of an ostensibly unscripted news conference and deep consternation among White House reporters worried about the increasingly blurry line between traditional news organizations and ideological outlets. But it also generated plenty of scorn from new media representatives about how privileged old-line media types were whining about their turf while missing the profound changes of the information age.

Don't comment on the story if you didn't bother to read it. Yea, you. Dipshits.

From the article:

'Joe Lockhart, who was a press secretary for Mr. Clinton, said the problem with the tactic involving Mr. Pitney was that it created a distraction from the more important issue, namely Mr. Obama’s response to the crisis in Iran.

“The idea was a good one,” he said, “but it would have worked better if they told everyone in advance what they were planning. They’re now getting an object lesson that the most interesting story in the briefing room to reporters is a story about themselves.”'

I'm going to have to agree with Mr. Lockhart on this one. A legitimate question, but in the future, Obama will hopefully know to avoid this kind of situation, seeing how much trouble it appears to have stirred up.

From the article:

'Reached later, Mr. Gibbs said he had no regrets.

“I wouldn’t do it differently, and I would do it again,” he said. “We thought it was very important to get a question in from someone in Iran, to have somebody to be able to ask the president a question who’s living with this. There’s no other way to do this.”

He noted that the question — wouldn’t acceptance of Iran’s disputed election results be “a betrayal of what the demonstrators there are working toward”? — was “a very legitimate, tough question,” and hardly a softball.'

I think a few of you are missing the meat of this story.

Selective questions make life easy, slick Obama marketing and media churning machine. Keep up the crap and everyone will one day see what this administration has managed to MANUFACTURE!

Well said Hydrokat and it can't happen soon enough, phoney, misleading, lying, and the rest of the so called media is dying as people become more aware of the internet and the bloggers the more people become aware of what is happening in the real world. It's about time we got rid of the Bigots like Rupert Murdoch and his co-horts. Its about time we got rid of a Jewish controlled media, like CBS,NBC, ABC, Faux, etc. Now maybe I won't have to watch and hear about the Holocoust 24 hours a day. It is time to move on and watch as Israhell performs it's own holocoust on the Palestinians. Maybe the world will wake up from the deep sleep it seems to be in.

Don't tell me President Teleprompter had a question planted for him. I can't beleive it!

Here is the dirty little secret about White House news conferences: The president almost always knows the questions in advance.

But here is the rest of that secret: It is not because White House officials are planting questions or reporters are colluding with them.

In fact, despite widespread speculation to the contrary, the White House does not give reporters much if any notice that they will be called on, and reporters almost never tell the White House what they will ask. But everyone has a pretty good idea anyway. In the day leading up to a White House news conference, a president and his staff typically spend hours gaming out likely questions and rehearing responses.

The truth is, it is not all that hard for an administration to figure out what will be asked. The news of the day usually makes at least the opening queries pretty obvious. And the president’s press secretary spends an hour each day fielding questions on camera from the same reporters, so it becomes clear what lines of inquiry are on their minds. Veterans of the last several White Houses have always said that they were able to correctly forecast nearly all of the questions, though not necessarily the precise wording.

All this has come up again because President Obama called on Nico Pitney, a blogger for the left-leaning Huffington Post, in an orchestrated move during Tuesday’s news conference. As Kate Phillips outlined on The New York Times’s Caucus blog, Mr. Pitney has been writing extensively about the protests in Iran and soliciting questions from Iranians, so the White House asked him to come to the news conference so the president could call on him and address an inquiry forwarded from an Iranian.