the kicker

Tapper: "Bad Ass" or "Pissy Little Spat?"

February 10, 2009

Is Jake Tapper, ABC News’s White House correspondent (and my vote for “Best Question” last night), the “Briefing Room Bad Ass” or an instigator of “pissy little spats?” At The Daily Beast Rachel Sklar gets some of Tapper’s unnamed peers to weigh in on Tapper’s approach and his motives (isn’t he totally trying to be the next David Gregory?). And then there’s the one who wouldn’t play along, who kind of tells Sklar that her story premise is bunk:

And while more than one other person also used the word “showboating,” a briefing room colleague was a little more zen: “It’s too early to judge anyone… And I wouldn’t get too worked up over the press briefings. Judge all of us on the reporting, analysis, and packages.”

Liz Cox Barrett is a writer at CJR.