Robert Gibbs

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has evaded answering the question of whether President Barack Obama agrees with Dr. Donald Berwick, his newly appointed administrator of Medicare and Medicaid, who has insisted that health-care systems must redistribute wealth."Excellent health care is by definition redistributional," Berwick said in a speech delivered on July 1, 2008.When asked directly at the…

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made the rounds on the network morning shows on Tuesday, ahead of President Obama's prime time Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill. While he had confrontational interviews on CBS's Early Show and NBC's Today, on ABC's Good Morning America, co-host George Stephanopoulos made sure Gibbs's appearance was low-stress.Stephanopoulos kept the questions…

NBC's Andrea Mitchell took up the cause of the White House in admonishing Big Labor for wasting their money on trying to defeat Arkansas Democratic Senator Blanche Lincoln in the primary there, as she echoed their concern, on Thursday's Andrea Mitchell Reports, that organized labor essentially aided Republican John Boozman's chances to win in the general election. Mitchell invited on AFSCME…

The obfuscation displayed by White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Tuesday, in refusing to address factual contradictions in the Joe Sestak job offer storyline, is so obvious that even MSNBC's Chris Matthews on Wednesday night showcased a “kerfuffle” between Gibbs and CNSNews.com's Fred Lucas who dared to point out a Congressman cannot serve in the un-paid board position reportedly offered…

Helen Thomas was her typical, Israel-hating self Tuesday when during the White House press briefing, she called the previous day's flotilla incident a "deliberate massacre, an international crime."When she got her chance to ask White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs a question at the proceeding, Thomas was relentless in her accusations. "If any other nation in the world had done it, we would…

Doesn't everyone remember in 2005 when George W. Bush's Press Secretary Scott McClellan (bless his back-stabbing heart) called reporters into the West Wing of the White House and scolded them for asking too many questions about Hurricane Katrina? That followed a similar admonishment earlier in the year about the press's obsession with anything and everything to do with the Iraq War. You don't…

Bill O'Reilly on Wednesday said the Obama administration has started a new war with Fox News."As you may remember, the President and his team harshly criticized Fox News last fall for not being fair. And that led to a vigorous back and forth between the FNC troop and the White House, which of course jazzed our ratings up a bit. Then things kind of died down." After White House press secretary…

Fox News's Neil Cavuto on Wednesday struck back at Robert Gibbs for his "botched White House presser." On Tuesday, the White House press secretary took exception with Cavuto inviting former FEMA director Michael Brown on the previous day's "Your World" to offer a conspiracy theory about the Obama administration's response to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.As NewsBusters reported, Gibbs badly…

A rather strange thing happened Tuesday when Fox News's Wendell Goler tried asking Robert Gibbs a question at the afternoon briefing: he got scolded by the White House press secretary for an interview Neil Cavuto did with former FEMA director Michael Brown the previous day.To set this up, Brown on FNC's "Your World" said he felt the White House intentionally delayed action on the oil spill in the…

Although to ask this question is to invite with a good degree of criticism, it is still worth asking: Is Obama administration's approach to publicly reprimanding private industry cause for concern? On CNBC's May 4 "Squawk Box," host Michelle Caruso-Cabrera raised this point and asked Washington correspondent John Harwood if White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs' recent statement BP was a…

"If you’re a fan of Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh, try reading a few columns on the Huffington Post website."So said President Barack Obama in his commencement address to the University of Michigan 2010 graduates Saturday. "If we choose only to expose ourselves to opinions and viewpoints that are in line with our own, studies suggest that we will become more polarized, more set in our ways,"…

In his regular online chat at washingtonpost.com, Post media reporter Howard Kurtz responded to a question about Obama holding more press conferences to give the people "an ongoing view of his intellect, grasp of issues, and moderate temperament and views," but he seems to have "little, if any respect" for the press corps. Kurtz responded: My sense is that the president respects the mainstream…

When interviewing White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on Sunday's edition of Reliable Sources on CNN, host Howard Kurtz suggested Bret Baier's interview with President Obama was an "interrupt-a-thon," as if the proper role of a journalist is to allow 90 seconds for each answer. It sounded like a CNN host attacking the other team, or simply like a softball question: KURTZ: Let me ask you…

On Tuesday's front page, Washington Post reporter Jason Horowitz reported press secretary Robert Gibbs will eventually be promoted out of that pedestrian job of White House press secretary and become a senior strategist. Team Obama's disdain for their press enablers was a given: By and large, positive coverage has always been a fact of life in the Obama universe, so it's not surprising that the…