That dustup over Chronicle reporter Carla Marinucci’s alleged violation of White House press pool rules by using a camera phone to shoot forbidden video of President Obama’s breakfast protest serenade at a St. Regis Hotel fundraiser has devolved into a spitting match.Add Chronicle: The Chronicle says the White House tossed Marinucci out of future press pool coverage and threatened to punish other Hearst reporters if the newspaper made the punishment public, as Phil Bronstein wrote Thursday. The White House says it made no such threats, and is calling the newspaper and editor Ward Bushee a liar, in so many words.
Add Dispute: Meanwhile, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston chimes in with a pox on both their houses. He says the White House has handled the whole thing like amateurs, but that Bushee and Bronstein shouldn’t have let the White House off the hook by letting the newspaper attribute the alleged threats to an anonymous White House source in its day-after coverage.
Postscript: No such anonymous source in today’s Chronicle follow up. It quotes White House Press Secretary Jay Carney (pictured). And, as one might expect, he’s insisting there was and is no threat.
