So It's War For NBC?

This crap is incredible:

There is more to the White House's unprecedented attack on NBC News yesterday than meets the eye.

The blistering letter to NBC from White House Counselor Ed Gillespie ostensibly focuses on the way President Bush's interview with NBC chief foreign correspondent Richard Engel was edited for presentation on Sunday's Nightly News.

But NBC's handling of the interview was not atypical for a tightly-edited broadcast and did not violate any journalistic norms. The White House may believe that news outlets are obliged to reproduce all of Bush's non-answers in their rambling entirety, but that's not the way the news business works.

Here's a link to the interview in question.

As Froomkin later points out in the above article, the Preznit seemed to be getting more and more pissed as the interview went on. It wasn't the editing that was a problem, it was the fact that he was confronted with pointed and challenging questions. The village idiot is so used to wet kiss questions that he usually gets he got miffed when facing a, you know, real journalist.

It looks to me like the White House is joining in on the Faux war against NBC. These are classic Republican pushback tactics to try and put the media back in the box anytime they do their jobs. Let's hope NBC/MSNBC keeps their balls and do the job they are charged with doing.