Now it gets vicious.
Oh my, so many dynamics of interest here.
First off, Nico Pitney, along with the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan, has pulled off an excellent journalistic feat over the past few week in covering the Green Revolution. Namely, they managed to quickly get knee-deep into breaking raw info. While they put the necessary caveats to the tide pouring in, they have also done their best to verify much of the information and add needed context and analysis to an extremely complicated event. Both have also used their own contacts inside Iran to help make sense of the situation on the ground.
In short, they did journalism. Pitney has never hid his leftist views (nor Sullivan his conservative ones), but he's done good work by just about any standard. Any budding journalist should be studying both bloggers for a small primer in how to blend new methods with old school contact-working. While I've written about the value of journalistic objectivity, writers like Pitney and Sullivan do excellent work, even if their affiliation is known ahead of time.
Then comes in Dana Milbank and the guard-dogs of tradition, who went apoplectic when Pitney got the second question from President Obama at a recent press conference. All of a sudden, Pitney gets accused of collusion, even though the question was solicited from Iranians and was a good, razor-sharp one. On top of all that, Pitney later characterized Obama's response as dodging the question -- hardly the views of a plant.
Look at the video above. The first item mentioned is that calling upon Pitney violated the established pecking order of White House Press conferences. Not the "collusion" that's later shifted to as his main sin. That crossing of privilege, I think, is really the issue here. Milbank's disgust is blatant, and hard to understand in any other light.
Doubly interesting is that Milbank is essentially a glorified gossip-columnist who occasionally dabbles in reporting; he's got much more in common with stereotypical off-the-cuff blogger than a Murrow-style truth hound. However, he works for the Washington Post, not some johnny-come-lately blog, dammit. He has a tie! That used to count for something!
Of course, Pitney could have conducted himself in a more dignified manner, but his ire is understandable. The guy's just poured his heart and soul into some great reporting about Iran, and gets clucked at by a national media establishment that's fallen flat on its face time after time. At some point, it's worth bluntly calling bullshit.
At its core, this is a turf fight. What's changed is that this time Pitney is at the table too, instead of the usual media inner circle doing the sniping at a distant target. That, in itself, is an acknowledgment of how the landscape's changing.
Of course, as interesting as all of this is to those of us in media land, at some point the general public (in all its various fragments) will say Jesus, why won't you all shut the fuck up already and get us the goddamn news. They'll be right.
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