Obama scrambles the media pecking order

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By Jon Ward

President Obama during his White House press conference Tuesday recognized the power of new technology in Iran's massive street protests by soliciting a question from a blogger who has been gathering information and queries from Tehran online.

Mr. Obama upended the established media order as well by giving Nico Pitney, from the liberal Huffington Post Web site, the second question of his press conference.

"I know Nico Pitney is here from the Huffington Post," Mr. Obama said, after answering his first question from the Associated Press, which is the longstanding tradition.

But current protocol also calls for rival news wire Reuters to get the second question, followed by the major TV networks and then the country's leading newspapers.

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Mr. Obama called on Reuters after Mr. Pitney but then continued to disrupt the regular order by calling on a reporter from Fox News, the conservative cable TV network, fourth, and then on a reporter from USA Today, followed only then by the big three networks.

Mr. Pitney has been live-blogging on events as they happen in Iran since protests erupted after the disputed June 12 elections in which incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was declared the winner.

Much of Mr. Pitney's work has been to aggregate videos as they are uploaded to YouTube by users in Iran, as well as notes on Twitter and e-mail sent from inside the heavily-censored Islamic country.

The Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan has also been a key online destination for readers looking for video and first-person accounts from Iran.

The role of the new Internet messaging and video sites in circumventing the Tehran's government censors and distributing information about the uprising against the government has become a major story over the last week.