Seems like only a month ago that the prospect of Huffington Post reporter Sam Stein and Talking Points Memo's Christina Bellantoni filing White House pool reports was giving the high priests of elite Washington media a serious case of the vapors. Concerns were raised "about pool reports coming from left or right-leaning news organizations that will then be used by the rest of the press corps." At the New York Times, Peter Baker was worried about his paper would find itself "in a position of relying on overtly ideological or opinionated organizations as our surrogate news gatherers."
I think we can all agree that the business of pool report writing was just too super-serious to take chances!
Well, I really feel bad for the right-leaning Washington Examiner's Julie Mason, because once all those hyper-concerned people read her report on President Barack Obama's comments this afternoon on the Christmas Crotchfire Aftermath, they will surely be publicly digging her eyes out with spoons:
President Obama was a few minutes late into the State Dining Room to deliver his report on the Christmas Day bombing attempt. He walked in unaccompanied from the direction of the Red Room and stood before the Lincoln portrait over the fireplace, reading off the TOTUS. No one got fired, or if they were he didn't mention it.
At the conclusion of his remarks (see transcript) he walked back out the way he came in, this time ignoring a shouted question about his confidence in Leiter. Also: Nothing on Orszag's love child.
Let's see: you have snark about the teleprompter (that's what "TOTUS" refers to, for those uninitiated in our super-adult political discourse), snark about no one getting fired, with a kicker about White House budget director Orszag's personal life that everyone in the print pool is going to find super-useful in a report about national security.
I guess we should just brace ourselves for the epic outrage that's sure to come.
PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
HuffPost, TPM In White House Pool: Newspaper Reporters Gripe
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