The new Jeff Gannon is a tweety-pie on Iran

Remember Media Whores Online, the pioneer online left-wing web journal? It was an oasis of sanity at a time when the right threatened to commandeer the internet, just as it had taken over talk radio.

Well, now HuffPo editor Nico Pitney has proven that the left can be just as whorish. That's right: We have a new Jeff Gannon! Maybe we should start a "kneepads for Nico" fund...?

From the Atlantic:

What makes the Pitney-Obama exchange different is that the White House seems to have called Pitney and told him that they might call on him for an Iran question because of his yeoman's work aggregating Tweets and blogs from Iran. But since Pitney didn't tell the White House what question it was, I don't think there was any untoward coordination.

Hmm. But the NYT hints at the trouble with that picture...

Mr. Pitney has been live-blogging the fallout from the Iranian elections, sifting through Twitter feeds and other available observations and reports for news about the situation for several days. As our own staff knows at The Times, this has been an arduous task, partly because some reality is ungettable, some reports are questionable and others are downright fictitious.

Just how reliable are these tweets? NPR:

It's impossible to know even if what you're reading was actually written by people in Tehran or elsewhere in Iran, especially since there's a movement for as many people in the Twittersphere to use the Iranian capital as their location a là "I'm Spartacus" to make it harder for Iranian censors to stop tweets that are actually from Iran.

True/Slant:

Here are a few of the things that we’ve “learned” the last few days about the Iranian elections and their aftermath:

— 3 million people protested Monday in Tehran
— the losing candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was put under house arrest
— the president of the election monitoring committee declared the election invalid on Saturday

These are just a handful of data points that have been shooting around the Internet, via Twitter or the opposition-friendly blogs. And all have been instrumental in building a public opinion case against the Iranian government for undercounting the support for Mousavi.

The problem is, none of them appear any longer to be true. The crowd was in the hundreds of thousands, most newspapers reported. Mousavi’s own wife said he wasn’t under house arrest Sunday, and Monday he appeared in person at the protest. And if the president of the election monitoring commission has gone over to the opposition, no serious reporter has reported it.

Also see here, if you dare. And here and here.

The operative phrase, I believe, is "catapulting the propaganda." Many have excused Nico's bent-knee performance on the grounds that Obama did not know the specific question ahead of time. Look closer.The people who feel satisfied by that explanation are, you should pardon the expression, twits.