WaPo Blogger Pesters Daily Caller's Neil Munro for Answers About His Question to Obama

Neil Munro is the reporter — the only reporter — who tried to get any answers out of Obama last Friday when the president announced his immigration policy fiat. Presumably the Washington Post had a reporter there, but they were content to act as the president’s stenographer.

Today, Post blogger Erik Wemple wastes time trying to get Munro to answer a question that his boss, Tucker Carlson, has already answered. Or something like that. Honestly, it’s hard to get at just what Wemple wants from Munro since everyone knows what happened and more or less why. Here is Wemple’s entire post.

Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro famously interrupted President Obama on Friday during a presentation on immigration policy.

Objection: Obama’s statement was not a “presentation on immigration policy.” It was a statement of a radical political shift in immigration policy.

An impressive number of people outside of the Daily Caller deemed Munro’s actions rude, unacceptable or something along those lines.

The ostensibly high-minded but actually absent-minded response from Daily Caller-land zeroes in on accountability. From Munro:

I timed the question believing the president was closing his remarks, because naturally I have no intention of interrupting the President of the United States. I know he rarely takes questions before walking away from the podium. When I asked the question as he finished his speech, he turned his back on the many reporters, and walked away while I and at least one other reporter asked questions.”From Daily Caller boss Tucker Carlson:

A reporter’s job is to ask questions and get answers. Our job is to find out what the federal government is up to. Politicians often don’t want to tell us. A good reporter gets the story. We’re proud of Neil Munro.

Enthused by the Daily Caller’s approach to accountability, I reached out this morning to Munro in search of an interview on Friday’s events. The response:

Sorry.

Too busy with health-care, etc.

Thanks,

Neil

Waiting to hear back from Munro on whether his no-comment complies with his own principles on public accountability. He appears to be learning what it’s like to have the questions coming at him.

Notice that Wemple did not include his own email to Munro. Why? What are you hiding, Erik? Why not include the question you asked Munro?

I have to wonder if the Post hasn’t gotten a bit sensitive lately in its role running interference for and guarding the president. Or maybe they’re a bit sensitive about being Kaplan’s vast money pit. Honestly, there are probably a few things killing morale at the Washington Post. So they lash out at those of us who enjoy our jobs mocking the likes of the Washington Post.

Last week they poked around here looking for correction on a story we didn’t even write, we just linked to it questioning what the EPA was up to. The Post wanted a correction, but it turned out that the EPA policy in question was arguably as bad as the one originally reported by Fox, to which we linked. As I said at that time, when the Post stops directly quoting dead people who aren’t around to verify whether they’re being quoted accurately or not, and when it stops running stories about rocks in west Texas and the possibility that Mitt Romney might have behaved as a boy when he was in fact a boy, it might gain some standing to question new media reporters like Neil Munro and myself.

For whatever it’s worth, which isn’t much, I’d have preferred if Munro hadn’t interrupted Obama. But it was clear at the time that the president had a PR train he was rolling out that didn’t involve consulting with the people or answering any questions from the press. He wanted to push his illegal policy, make a grand statement about it in the Rose Garden to give it a false image of legimitacy, publish his op-ed in Time, and watch the Republicans set themselves on fire over it. Instead, he got a rude question, but the question was less than a thousandth as rude as the president’s actions on this issue.