CNN's White House correspondent Dan Lothian made headlines with his ridiculous softball question [1] to President Obama on Sunday. However, as MRC has documented, Lothian has posed such a soft question to Obama before, and has shown some liberal bias in his past reporting.
Lothian asked the President at Sunday's press conference in Hawaii if he thought the Republican candidates, who supported the practice of waterboarding, were "uninformed, out of touch, or irresponsible." Fox News analyst Bernie Goldberg later called it [2] "the most ridiculous question I have ever heard by a regular reporter from a so-called mainstream news outfit. Ever."
However, just last December Lothian teed up [3] Obama with this question at a presser:
"Can you give us an update on that car that you talk so much about being in the ditch? Can you give us an update as to where it is today? What kind of highway do you think it will be driving on in 2011? Who will really be behind the wheel given the new makeup in Congress? And what do you think Republicans will be sipping and saying next year?"
Lothian was referring to Obama's remarks that Republicans were like a driver who steered a car into a ditch and, after not helping to push it out, demanded the keys back.
Reporting on President Obama's Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, Lothian hailed it as an "'A' for effort. [4]" He also raved that Obama could use that achievement to help enact a health care plan.
"Perhaps, this could be something that helps this administration not only push through on the front in Afghanistan, but also – you know, health care as well – a lot of hurdles involving health care," Lothian gushed.
In 2006, Lothian framed candidate Mitt Romney's presidential aspirations as an appeal "to the far right."
"But Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney seems to be carving out his base by appealing, political experts say, to the far right," Lothian said on American Morning of Romney, a moderate Republican.
Lothian also slammed President Bush's State of the Union Address earlier that year when he termed it a "slap in the face" to residents of New Orleans that Bush spoke for less than a minute about the ravaged city. The federal government had already committed $85 billion to rebuilding New Orleans post-Katrina.
"In one word, disappointment," he said of the city's reaction to Bush's address. "People feel that they were simply a footnote in that speech, that it was essentially a slap in the face."