Carney Kabuki: Reporter Claims WH Press Secretary Gets Questions from Reporters Before Press Briefing (Updated)

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“A CBS reporter from Arizona reveals that President Obama’s press secretary, Jay Carney, receives questions from the press in advance of his daily press briefing. In fact, she says, the reporters often receive the answers in advance of the briefing, too,” Daniel Halper writes at the Weekly Standard, linking to the above video featuring an excerpt of Catherine Anaya of KPHO, the CBS affiliate in Phoenix.

Money quote:

“And then he also mentioned that a lot of times, unless it’s something breaking, the questions that the reporters actually ask — the correspondents — they are provided to him in advance. So then he knows what he’s going to be answering and sometimes those correspondents and reporters also have those answers printed in front of them, because of course it helps when they’re producing their reports for later on. So that was very interesting.”

In the London Daily Mail, Carney responds by calling Anaya a liar:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is denying a television news reporter’s claim that reporters often ‘provide the questions to him in advance,’ before his daily briefings, and that he sometimes provides answers on paper before taking the podium.

‘If only this were true,’ Carney told MailOnline Thursday morning.

He was responding to a claim from KPHO-TV5 anchor Catherine Anaya, who reported Wednesday night on what she called an ‘off the record’ meeting yesterday morning between Carney and a handful of local TV reporters hand-picked to interview President Barack Obama.

For what it’s worth, Jake Tapper of CNN, and Ed Henry of Fox News each deny on Twitter ever submitting questions ahead of time. But certainly, from Mr. Obama’s heavy reliance on teleprompters, to musicians miming to prerecorded backing tracks at both of Obama’s presidential inaugurations, to CNN, CBS and ABC all shilling for Obamacare, and MSNBC reading corrections from the Obama White House on the air in real time, there’s been an enormous amount of coordination from the White House and the supine MSM. (And quite a war from the White House against Fox News, Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post, and anyone in the media who refuses to toe the Democrat party line.) Would anybody be surprised at this late if what Anaya is reporting is true?

Related: “Obama taps local TV anchors,” Real Clear Politics notes, to generate happy Obamacare talk.

Update: Matt Drudge links to Halper’s article, along with several related items that appear to lend credence to Anaya’s comments:

More: “Don’t misunderstand. This reporter is just ignorant enough to be trusted,” Rush Limbaugh claims. Read the whole thing.

Update (4:15 PM Pacific): In order to salvage her career and/or avoid having the IRS sicced on her, Anaya furiously backpedals. “‘My mistake and I own up to it’: Phoenix reporter reverses course, says White House Press Secretary Jay Carney DOESN’T get daily briefing questions in advance,” the London Daily Mail reports — except when he does, as the Drudge Report examples above would seem to illustrate. Or as Jim Treacher quips, “By the standard imposed by liberals and the media (PTR), I’m ruling this story False, But Also True Because I Want It to Be True.”

Heh.™ Jim Geraghty also adds further evidence weighing against Anaya’s original take:

If Carney really knew reporters’ questions in advance, wouldn’t he, you know… be better at answering them?

— jimgeraghty (@jimgeraghty) March 20, 2014

Oh and, “unexpectedly,” the Drudge-lanched video of Anaya’s original report was memory holed; however, we downloaded a copy before it vanished, and now that its disappearance is newsworthy, we’ve replaced that clip with our copy above.

(Bumped to top.)