President Obama took a question from an Iranian citizen during his Tuesday press conference, via Huffington Post reporter Nico Pitney, marking a small step towards a more open and interactive Washington press corps. You might not know that, however, from the press corps' reaction.

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President Obama took a question from an Iranian citizen during his Tuesday press conference, via Huffington Post reporter Nico Pitney, marking a small step towards a more open and interactive Washington press corps. You might not know that, however, from the press corps' reaction.

Since Obama was inaugurated, many media critics, citizen journalists and web activists have been calling on him to answer meaningful, unfiltered questions from citizens. After watching the Obama Campaign in action, people saw the potential for deeper, direct engagement between wired citizens and a President who gets new media and believes in transparency.

Citizen media pioneer Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media, proposed a citizen press corps to corner politicians on hard questions. Ask The President, which I helped launch in a coalition spanning The Washington Times, The Nation and TechPresident, has already convened national voting on citizen questions for Obama's press conferences. And several White House correspondents have solicited citizen suggestions for potential questions at Obama's pressers, including Jake Tapper, Chuck Todd, Ana Marie Cox and Jon Ward.

Thus it was likely -- and hardly surprising -- that a citizen question would be posed at a presidential press conference. Given the news, it happened to come from Tehran, not Tennessee.

So the complaints of several Washington reporters are not only odd, but hard to take at face value. It is particularly rich for reporters to protest that the White House told Pitney he might be tapped for a question. Every day, a few top White House correspondents have special access in press briefings, while many reporters are never called on (seating charts are powerful). And many Washington reporters routinely, secretly grant the White House blind quotes and restrictive ground rules in exchange for access. By contrast, Pitney transparently told readers about his dealings with the White House, in real time, on his blog. The public would be better served if all media outlets took that tack, publishing any arrangements, restrictions or ground rules along with every article or interview. (Readers would be interested -- media criticism and scrutiny tends to draw traffic across the spectrum.)

Unfortunately, the media's complaints threaten to overshadow the minor progress made on Tuesday. (Imagine that.) By injecting a citizen question into a live presidential press conference, Pitney cracked the Beltway boundaries on who gets to interrogate the President. It matters who is empowered in this rarefied role -- demanding answers from the President on the spot, on air, shaping the framing and priorities of our political discourse. And it's past time that regular citizens, from across the country and around the world, get a turn.

Ari Melber, a Nation correspondent, wrote about citizen questions for President Obama in The People's Press Conference, which ran in the April 6 edition of The Nation. This post is originally from The Nation.

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Authors Bio:
Ari Melber is the Net movement correspondent for The Nation magazine, the oldest political weekly in America, and a writer for The Nation's 2008 campaign blog. He is also a columnist for The Politico and a contributing editor at the Personal Democracy Forum, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. Melber served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate and was a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign.




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As a commentator on public affairs, Melber has been quoted by publications such as The New York Times, Roll Call, and Time, and appeared on national radio and television, including CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, FOX, MSNBC, NPR and Air America, on programs such as “American Morning,” "Washington Journal," "Power Lunch," “The Live Desk," “Weekend Live with Brian Wilson,” "MSNBC Reports with David Shuster," "Your World with Neil Cavuto," "MSNBC Election Night After Hours," “MSNBC Live with Contessa Brewer,” "MSNBC Live with Amy Robach," “MSNBC Live with Chris Jansing,” and "MSNBC Live with Alex Witt," among others.




Melber has been a featured speaker at forums sponsored by the Harvard Law School, Yale Political Science Department; Campaign for America's Future; Young Democrats of America; Democracy for America; New York's Blogging Liberally; YearlyKos 2006, the first national netroots convention; and YearlyKos 2007. He also served on the Advisory Committee to the YearlyKos Leadership Forum for seven presidential candidates in August 2007.