The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank Calls Nico Pitney a 'Dick' After Heated Debate on CNN

Posted by Amanda Terkel at 7:39 AM on June 29, 2009.

Last week, the Huffington Post’s Nico Pitney (who is also a former member of ThinkProgress) found himself in the center of controversy after President Obama called on him at a press conference. One of the harshest pieces came from the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank, who called Pitney a “planted questioner.” Today the two faced off on Howie Kurtz’s “Reliable Sources” segment on CNN. Pitney called some of Milbank’s past reporting “pathetic,” and Milbank claimed that Nico had “worked in collusion with an administration.”

The discussion was evidently so heated that Milbank called him a “dick” at the end of the segment, as Pitney writes on Huffington Post:

The only thing that surprised me was when Dana turned to me after our initial sparring and called me a “dick” in a whispered tone (the specific phrase was, I believe, “You’re such a dick”). Howie Kurtz wrote on Twitter that he didn’t hear it, which is understandable — he was doing the lead-in for the next part of the segment on the ABC White House special. But it happened (I urge Howie to watch the video of the panel during the ABC intro) and it was frankly pretty odd.

Amanda Terkel is Deputy Research Director at the Center for American Progress and serves as Deputy Editor for The Progress Report and ThinkProgress.org at the Center for American Progress.