President Obama took a question from an Iranian citizen during his Tuesday press conference, via Huffington Post reporter Nico Pitney, marking a small step towards a more open and interactive Washington press corps. You might not know that, however, from the press corps' reaction.
Since Obama was inaugurated, many media critics, citizen journalists and web activists have been calling on him to answer meaningful, unfiltered questions from citizens. After watching the Obama Campaign in action, people saw the potential for deeper, direct engagement between wired citizens and a President who gets new media and believes in transparency.
Citizen media pioneer Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media, proposed a citizen press corps to corner politicians on hard questions. Ask The President, which I helped launch in a coalition spanning The Washington Times, The Nation and TechPresident, has already convened national voting on citizen questions for Obama's press conferences. And several White House correspondents have solicited citizen suggestions for potential questions at Obama's pressers, including Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, Ana Marie Cox and Jon Ward.
Thus it was likely -- and hardly surprising -- that a citizen question would be posed at a presidential press conference. Given the news, it happened to come from Tehran, not Tennessee.
So the complaints of several Washington reporters are not only odd, but hard to take at face value. It is particularly rich for reporters to protest that the White House told Pitney he might be tapped for a question. Every day, a few top White House correspondents have special access in press briefings, while many reporters are never called on (seating charts are powerful). And many Washington reporters routinely, secretly grant the White House blind quotes and restrictive ground rules in exchange for access. By contrast, Pitney transparently told readers about his dealings with the White House, in real time, on his blog. The public would be better served if all media outlets took that tack, publishing any arrangements, restrictions or ground rules along with every article or interview. (Readers would be interested -- media criticism and scrutiny tends to draw traffic across the spectrum.)
Unfortunately, the media's complaints threaten to overshadow the minor progress made on Tuesday. (Imagine that.) By injecting a citizen question into a live presidential press conference, Pitney cracked the Beltway boundaries on who gets to interrogate the President. It matters who is empowered in this rarefied role -- demanding answers from the President on the spot, on air, shaping the framing and priorities of our political discourse. And it's past time that regular citizens, from across the country and around the world, get a turn.
UPDATE: Today Salon blogger Glenn Greenwald discusses the import of having an "actual Iranian" ask a question at the press conference, and features a new, must-see video featuring one of the reporters who has been complaining about the citizen question.
Ari Melber, a Nation correspondent, wrote about citizen questions for President Obama in The People's Press Conference, which ran in the April 6 edition of The Nation. This post is originally from The Nation.
Follow Ari Melber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/AriMelber
that their relevance has finally died...
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The media revolt here is also metaphorically like the Iranian situation, the Orwellian suppression by centralized control of media, being resisted by grassroots questioning and connections-- even Republican twitters claim this is so. It wasn't that long ago our own regime intimated the press into conformity with "freedom" fries, or the quid pro quo for access. So you are right, it does matter who is given the "rarified" role of questioner.
Obama has said a couple of interesting things about the press. During the inside the whitehouse special he told Brian Williams that he doesn't watch the cable news shows because they are like professional wrestling, each has a role to play in the theater, which isn't all that helpful. Second, he says reads letters from citizens every day because he is concerned that being in the insulated environment you describe as the "beltway" will cut him off from understanding what American's think.
The U.N has/is distributing that money for rebuilding destroyed homes, schools, clinics and hospitals.
Do you not support humanity?
Or do they have to be of your ideology to be allowed the privilege of life on this earth?
They used to think your way in early '30s Germany, too!
OIL
OIL
OIL.
Be critical of the leadership of Iran and it could cause them to cut the oil shipments and thus raising the price, something the world including China, Europe and especially the USA and their respective politicans - especially Pres. Obama - who can't afford the political hit as well right now.
Bush was running the country into one ditch after another. It's like watching the tv show Cops, riding around jumping gentle people over victimless crimes like pot-smoking, and avoiding law enforcement issues that require a little courage. Fat chance this will get posted.
Henry Kissinger's approval of Obama's handling of the post-election violence and crackdown in Iran is in inverse relation to his opposition of Reagan's confrontational policies with the Soviet Union as being too provocative and dangerous. Kissinger is as mistaken about the clueless, weak, anti-Reagan appeaser as he was about Reagan's toughness and unwavering strength. And as Reagan's courage in international affairs and unyielding commitment to liberty and free enterprise made the world a vastly more peaceful and safer place Obama's invincible ignorance, lack of strength and moral blindness to evil is leading this country and the world into extreme peril.
Postscript:
Reagan's failure at engagement with Iran, Iran Contra, is about to be repeated by the Clueless One. Many of us are ignorant of, or have forgotten, Operation Praying Mantis when Reagan ordered US destroyers in the Persian Gulf to open fire on Iranian Naval ships in retaliation for a US frigate damaged by an Iranian mine. Our forces sunk two Iranian destroyers and several armed speedboats. Also hit in the battle was an Iranian commercial jetliner carrying and killing 299 passengers-though an accident the number of dead Iranians matched the number of murdered servicemen who perished in the Iran backed Marine baracks attack five years earlier in Beirut.
Journalists need to take a hard look at themselves and their profession. There are some excellent professionals out there doing some amazing work. But none of them ever seems to show up at the White House.
And I didn't mind that Obama didn't answer the question - nor did I think he should....
I think it would be great if Obama did the same thing every so often. He'd probably want to spread it around among many different national radio talkshows, including ones with audiences inclined to be antagonistic. I doubt, however, that Rush, Hannity, Savage or Beck would want the President to be able to answer the allegations that they make that their listeners would parrot back in their questions. But if they did, wouldn't that be exciting?
He did go on Bill O'Reilly once - I've always felt O'Reilly had made a deal to pitch him only soft-ball type questions so he could get him to come on.
Do you find it strange that the president is too scared to take real questions from "the press" and talk show hosts?
Watch Bill O'Reilly take on Barney Fife (Frank) tonight on Fox if you get a break from watching ABC.