The Washington Post's Dana Milbank is usually excellent, but I've got to agree,
this is truly pitiful:
Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post has been providing unparalleled coverage of the ongoing events in Iran. The White House invited him to yesterday's press conference. And that made Dana Milbank all grumpy.
[...]
Why is Milbank so dismissive? His main complaint was that the White House had invited Nico Pitney of the Huffington Post and asked that he submit a question from one of his Iranian correspondents. Therefore, according to Milbank, this counted as a pre-arranged question -- a very big no-no.
The trouble here is that Milbank completely fails to acknowledge the fact that Nico Pitney has been scooping the WaPo day after day, minute by minute. By the time news of Iran hits the newspapers, it's pretty stale. And as for the cable channels, well, they try to slip it in to their regular infotainment, but in nice easy-to-digest doses.
The bottom line here? Increasingly, the "new media" - whether it be blogs, Twitter, YouTube, or other social media - are beating the "old media" at providing information, analysis, reporting, and opinion. In the case of Nico Pitney at the Huffington Post, he "has been tremendously informative, giving us information as soon as it reached him from individual Iranians." The fact that all Dana Milbank can say about this is "waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah" pretty much epitomizes why the corporate media is dying.
