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Dana Milbank wasn't the only Beltway Villager all wanked out about President Obama prearranging a question with HuffPo's Nico Pitney yesterday. On Meet the Press, David Gregory pressed David Axelrod about it, suggesting that somehow this sort of thing is anti-democratic:

MR. GREGORY: I just want to be clear. Did the White House coordinate with a reporter about a question to be asked at a press conference?

MR. AXELROD: The White House didn't coordinate with the reporter about a question, we were looking for a way to get questions from within Iran. We could--we did not have access to Iranian journalists.

MR. GREGORY: So you talked to a reporter beforehand and said, "Could you ask a question about--from--directly from Iran at a press conference?"

MR. AXELROD: We said if you--we, we, we, we, we knew that he had been and he was very publicly involved in getting--in trafficking and communications in and out of Iran, and we felt it was important...

MR. GREGORY: Well, why is it appropriate to coordinate with a reporter about what's asked at a time when we're championing democracy around the world?

MR. AXELROD: No, no, David, you miss...

MR. GREGORY: Is that, is that what you should do at a press conference?

MR. AXELROD: You're not, you're not listening to what I said. We didn't coordinate with, with him about what was asked.

MR. GREGORY: Right.

MR. AXELROD: In fact, he asked probably one of the most--the toughest and most probing questions at that press conference. We had no idea what he was going to ask.

MR. GREGORY: But you coordinated with him about, about that subject of a question beforehand.

MR. AXELROD: He was a, he was a, he was a, he was a vehicle to get questions from Iran asked at this press conference, and that we thought was not only appropriate but, but necessary.

MR. GREGORY: If President Bush had done that, don't you think Democrats would have said that's outrageous?

Gregory is a Beltway Villager, and like all such folk, he wants to cling to the well-honed myths that preserve their favorite fictions about themselves. One of these is that White House press conferences are actually exercises in democratic, even egalitarian questioning of government officials by the people's representatives in the press corps.

So they are loathe to admit a simple reality: White House press conferences are in cold reality carefully stage-managed affairs, and the main beneficiaries of this arrangement have been the handful of "elite" reporters from big-name media outlets who traditionally have dominated them.

We're perfectly aware that presidents have for some long time gone into these conferences with a prearranged list of reporters upon whom they are going to call. The result has been an immense trivialization of press conferences, because those "elite" reporters have demonstrated over the years their eagerness to indulge trivial, celebrity-media-driven questions at the expense of serious policy matters. In the process, they've become increasingly manipulable.

This trend reached its apotheosis back when Jeff Gannon was lobbing softball questions to President Bush and White House press secretary Scott McClellan. Not only was Gannon a phony journalist, he was being regularly selected to be among the main questioners at the daily briefings.

Considering that this same White House never came clean on exactly why it issued credentials to this fraud -- and especially considering that David Gregory never once objected to it -- his outrage over the Obama White House's calling on Pitney for the toughest question any reporter at that conference asked seems strangely misplaced.

On the other hand, considering that this White House's admission of people like Pitney into the circle of people who get to ask questions at these conferences represents a direct erosion of the "elite" status of people like David Gregory -- and in fact an opening of these questions to many more "representatives of the people" -- it's really not too surprising.

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Such a dick, indeed.

So Dana Milbank is outraged, outraged we tell you, that the White House prearranged a list of journalists it intended to call upon at last week's press conference -- as though this were not something, as we just noted, that's been going on for years, and which reached its zenith with the Bush White House using a fake reporter named "Jeff Gannon" to raise questions favorable to its talking points.

Of course, what Pitney did was precisely the opposite: He actually asked an extremely tough question that President Obama had a difficult time answering (and in fact failed to answer). Yet this is what the Village folk are all waving their Gucci torches and Armani pitchforks about.

Moreover, as Eric Boehlert observes at Media Matters, Milbank never bothered to even write about this on the pages of the Washington Post, either while it was happening or afterward.

However, he did in fact appear on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann on Feb. 9, 2005, to talk about Gannon. And while he was happy to kick Gannon around a little, this was his rationale about the whole affair:

MILBANK: Let's call him Mr. G. He did get to ask a question of the president whether that was deliberate or not.

You know, what it really comes down to here is that it is not the type of question he was asking. I find that funny, it was a brief break, it was an amusement. The fact is he was representing a phony media company that doesn't really have any such thing as circulation or readership, it's affiliated with something called GOP USA. So there are many people, Fox News, Washington Times, they are conservative but they are legitimate organizations. So this guy is not a real journalist. And he was hanging out there wasting everybody's time in the press room.

Now, Milbank can't possibly object to Pitney's presence or inclusion in the press conference on the grounds that Huffington Post "doesn't really have any such thing as circulation or readership" -- it in fact has one of the largest readerships of any entity on the Internet, dwarfing even the Washington Post's.

So he's left to cling to the thin fiction that Pitney's preselection by the White House was some kind of massive transgression of the unwritten rules of White House press conferences. And in a way it was: It proved that the old unwritten rule -- that Beltway hacks like Dana Milbank will be permitted to dominate our national conversation by trivializing press conferences with dumbass questions about baseball and swimming suits -- is no longer quite so operative.

Indeed, no one seems to have asked the really relevant question here: Why did the White House feel compelled to ensure that someone asked an Iran question? Answer: Because they almost certainly feared the usual onslaught of swimsuit, baseball and Michael Jackson questions.

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On Reliable Sources this morning, Howard Kurtz brings on Huffington Post's Nico Pitney to deal with two naysayers eager to scream "collusion!" over Nico's question to President Obama this week regarding the Iranian election: WaPo's Dana Milbank and TownHall's Amanda Carpenter. The fact that hyper-partisan Carpenter is even asked her opinion shows how little interest Kurtz had in an honest dialog. Seriously, Amanda, the video shows Nico in the back of the room behind other reporters--your complaining about Nico being "pushed to the front of the room" is discredited just like all your other "facts"--who you gonna believe? Amanda or your lyin' eyes?

But it's Dana Milbank who really gets his bitchy little knickers in a twist. He starts the segment incredibly defensive. It's hard to tell whether Dana is just miffed that he didn't get called on or that some upstart blogger who doesn't get the same Beltway cocktail party invitations asked a better question than he ever has.

This whole media-created "scandal" is ridiculously inane and smacks of a willful short memory which would be comical if it wasn't supplanting much more important discussions. Um, Howie, Dana, Amanda....does the name "Jeff Gannon" ring a bell? Jamison Foser:

Here's the thing: Nobody is actually claiming that Obama knew what question Pitney was going to ask. The allegations of "coordination" and "staging" are premised on the idea that the Obama folks knew what topic Pitney would ask about - Iran.

Well, it isn't all that unusual for a president to have a pretty good idea what topic a reporter is going to ask about. If you call on a reporter from Stars & Stripes or Army Times, you'll probably get a question relating to the military. Call on a Washington Post reporter, and you'll likely get a question about steroids in baseball or haircuts. Call on a New York Times reporter, and there's a pretty good chance he'll ask what enchants you about the White House. Call on a Huffington Post reporter, and they'll probably ask something a little more substantive.[..]

I'm pretty sure Dana Milbank knew what topic he was going to be asked about when he appeared on CNN's Reliable Sources opposite Pitney today. Ohmygod! Dana Milbank and Howard Kurtz coordinated! It was staged!

Oh, the stoopid hypocrisy. It hurts, doesn't it, Dana?

Just to put this into perspective, think about this. Nico Pitney has spent the last two weeks tirelessly developing sources from inside Iran, aggregating every relevant story available on the internet through every available form of the new communication technology and synthesizing one of the most most difficult and important foreign policy stories of the decade.

Dana Milbank has spent the same period bitching about the "low press" getting to ask questions at a press conference and filming snotty little gossip items for his little insider video embarrassment called "Mouthpiece Theatre."

And the newspapers wonder why they're dying. Let me remind all of you that WaPo decided to sack Froomkin, but kept Milbank. So goes the state of "journalism" at the Washington Post.

By the way, when I emailed Nico to congratulate him on a serious smackdown of the Very. Serious. Villager., he shared with me Milbank's comment to him as Kurtz was introducing the next segment: "You're such a dick." You stay classy, Dana.