Hating Sam Stein
The Huffington Post’s Sam Stein gets three or four scoops before you put in your contacts in the morning, so I wasn’t surprised that he got to ask a question at President Obama’s Monday press conference. Apparently, this was a pretty controversial move by the president. The Heritage Foundation sneered that “left-wing blogger Sam Stein” was on the president’s call list. According to Ana Marie Cox, Mara Liasson of NPR (who asked a toothless question about bipartisanship) was “surprised he didn’t call on Air America.” Then there was former White House spokesman Ari Fleischer on The O’Reilly Factor.
“„FLEISCHER: There are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They’re screened.
“„O’REILLY: Like the Huffington Post. Now it gets called on.
“„FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it “Siberia.” And I told the president, “Don’t call on Siberia.”
You’d never know that Stein asked (and elevated) a question that the White House had been dodging, about whether it supported “truth and reconciliation” prosecutions of former Bush officials. You’d think Stein had asked about Alex Rodriguez or something. Nope: That was the Washington Post.
