Congratulations, Michael!

Con­grat­u­la­tions are in order to our good friend Michael Hood, who has been keep­ing a crit­i­cal eye on talk radio over at blath­er­Watch since 2005.

Yes­ter­day, Michael became the first blog­ger from the Pacif­ic North­west cre­den­tialed to cov­er a White House press brief­ing, which is a pret­ty big deal.

As Michael recounts, it may have been just anoth­er day for the White House press corps, but it was a rather spe­cial expe­ri­ence for him. As he put it: “It was just plain thrilling for a small-town hack whose mea­ger off-line lifestyle is eat­ing crunchy snacks while plugged into cable teevee and haunt­ing the Sun­day shows.”

Inter­spersed with Michael’s humor­ous account of the brief­ing are sev­er­al amus­ing pic­tures of tired or inat­ten­tive reporters, com­plete with fit­ting captions.

Michael only briefly alludes to what White House Press Sec­re­tary Jay Car­ney and the half-dozen reporters he called upon talked about, but I can tell you from read­ing the tran­script of the brief­ing (which went on for about fifty min­utes) that most of the ques­tions were either about the admin­is­tra­tion’s diplo­mat­ic over­tures in the Mid­dle East or the fall­out from the res­ig­na­tion of Dominique Strauss-Kahn from the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund (IMF).

As Michael cor­rect­ly observed, not much news is typ­i­cal­ly made at White House press brief­in­gs, and today was no exception.

Still, it’s great that Michael was able to get into the James Brady Room for a day. Most blog­gers nev­er have that experience.