This story is such fun. The Setting: The monthly meeting Thursday of Howard Dean and Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid. Because of Dean’s recent remarks, “the appearance attracted a throng [of reporters],” writes CJR Daily.

Cutting through the “cacophony of competing screams” from the press was Fox News correspondent Brian Wilson, who asked Dean [if] he hated white Christians. Dean didn’t dignify that with a response, and Reid tried to talk about a “positive agenda,” but Wilson continued his line of questioning, prompting Democratic Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin to ask sardonically if Wilson was the one running the press conference.


Wonkette, The Huffington Post and AMERICAblog report that, when [WaPo reporter Mark] Leibovich asked Wilson who he was, Wilson screamed back, “Who the fuck are YOU?” … Leibovich asked the question because “Wilson was apparently wearing no credential of any kind … and behaving ‘bizarrely angry.'” … More, much more, below:

CJR Daily continues:

Those blogs also claim Leibovich said later that he asked Wilson who he was “because of his incredibly pointed questions”; Leibovich, say the blogs, “wondered whether or not [Wilson] was a rogue Republican staffer.” All three blogs wrote that Wilson later stormed down Senate halls, screaming obscenities.

Skeptical of such accounts, we cornered Leibovich today. “Yeah, I can confirm it,” he said. “It involved Brian Wilson of Fox News — not of the Beach Boys. And he was not giving out good vibrations.” He said Wilson wasn’t holding a notebook, and, “for all I knew he was Jeff Gannon, based on the tone and insistence of his questions.”

We asked Leibovich why his story — which, after all, was about reporters behaving badly — didn’t include his own exchange with Wilson. He referred us to his editor, Steve Reiss, who told us, “I think the story was properly focused on the scene with Dean and Reid and Durbin.”

So the exchange between the Wilson and Leibovich wasn’t relevant?

“I thought that was not really what the story was about,” said Reiss. “In any story you make choices about what you include and don’t include, and that was one of the choices that we made.”

Though we loved the Post‘s story, and its instinct to pull back the curtain on the manner in which reporters prefer political theater to substance, we would have made a different choice. Wilson’s outburst provided, in vivid detail, an example of his tactics at the photo op — and of the bullyboy style that it takes to get your questions heard in such an environment.

If, as Leibovich writes, “The … spectacle offered yet another distillation of why so many people believe that politicians and the media deserve each other,” then surely the reader deserves a full accounting of said spectacle.

Fortunately, even without outing Wilson as the boor that he clearly is, the Post still found a way to transform a largely useless media circus into something that gives readers a better sense of the workings of political journalism. And it did have the chops to close the piece with a quote from Durbin to a group of reporters:

“Please, for a minute, get to the substance,” said Durbin. “You guys should be ashamed of yourselves.”

—Brian Montopoli


Emphases mine.

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