UK scribe: America’s most skilled interrogators aren’t quizzing Fleischer

The Guardian
Matthew Engel says the job of an American White House correspondent “tends toward a form of stenography” and these “surprisingly young” reporters rarely display skepticism before White House spokesman Ari Fleischer. Foreign correspondents are effectively barred from the briefings, he says, but “no sane person would go twice anyway, since it is far harder for a journalist, denied the luxury of a little light torture, to extract information from Fleischer than for the CIA to get the facts from an al-Qaida hard case.” (The Guardian)