Hey, did you hear the one about the Republican shill suspected
of being a gay prostitute who snuck into the White House every day
for two years pretending to be a journalist? If you haven’t,
then the joke’s on you.
OK ““ let me start again, writes the impetuous college
columnist clearing his throat in mock professionalism. Hgghmm.
A man working as a White House correspondent under the assumed
name Jeff Gannon recently resigned from the Texas-based, GOP-linked
Talon News agency amid controversy over his biased reporting, his
links to several gay pornography Web sites, and his suspiciously
easy access to the president’s gated media courtyard.
Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, ignited a frenzy of
suspicion by asking the president at a press conference last month
the seemingly pre-scripted question how he could work with
Democrats “who seem to have divorced themselves from
reality.”
Prompted by this naked act of journalistic prostitution,
independent media bloggers ““ not the mainstream media ““
did some heavy Google-driven digging and unearthed some dirty
skeletons hidden in Gannon’s closet, just crying to be made
bones about.
First, Gannon was repeatedly rejected for Capitol Hill press
credentials, and yet was somehow cleared for near-daily access to
White House briefings and the president himself. This alone shocked
many established journalists, including New York Times columnist
Maureen Dowd.
A Pulitzer Prize-winning former White House correspondent, Dowd
wrote of being “mystified” as to how “I was
rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush
administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem
and Internet pictures where he posed like the “˜Barberini
Faun’ is credentialed to cover (the) White House.”
While no smoking gun yet exists proving that Gannon was planted
by the Bush administration for propaganda purposes, by Bush’s
own logic for invading Iraq, none need exist. Let’s let
circumstantial evidence do the thinking.
Here’s the smoking gun that the universe has a sense of
humor.
At the very same press conference that Gannon did his lapdog
bit, Bush was confronted by a real journalist, who asked if he
thought the $240,000 given to conservative pundit Armstrong
Williams by the Education Department to hype the No Child Left
Behind Act was a proper use of government funds.
“We’ve got new leadership going to the Department of
Education. But all our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we
will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda,” Bush
said. (Notice he said commentators, not reporters.)
“Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.
I’m confident you’ll be, over the course of the next
four years, willing to give our different policies an objective
look ““ won’t you? Yes, I can see that,” Bush told
reporters.
Translation: We have to pay the media to get the kind of
“objective” reporting that’s married to our
reality.
Dowd wrote that “even the Nixon White House didn’t
do anything this creepy. It’s worse than hating the press.
It’s an attempt to reinvent it.”
But is it?
“In terms of the history of biased reporters and
reporting,” said UCLA communication studies Professor Tim
Groeling, “the recent, and now declining, domination of the
news by “˜non-partisan’ media is a comparatively recent
development.”
In other words, Gannon-style advocacy journalism is more old
news than new. Plus, foregoing Watergate, Daddy Bush’s
“read my lips,” Clinton’s “I did not have
sexual relations” and Bush’s lies about weapons of mass
destruction, and everything else in between, does anybody really
believe anything any president ever says?
I’m not surprised by Bush’s doublespeak. We expect
our presidents to lie to us, but since Watergate, we expect our
journalists to catch them at it. The most disturbing thing is not
the pattern of underhanded news management “Gannongate”
represents, but the mainstream media’s near-total silence on
the matter.
Thomas Jefferson said given the choice between “government
without newspapers or newspapers without government, I should not
hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” But our trusted
watchdogs were fast asleep while the bloggers were hard at work
sniffing out this stink.
Even after the story broke through the information underground,
it still wasn’t the trusted guardians protecting our news
pages, but the columnists buried in the back pages who finally,
after days of delay, addressed the issue (Monica Lewinsky, Jason
Blair, Howard Dean, feel free to e-mail me your thoughts).
Why, I thought, does the Daily Bruin run other front-page
national stories that aren’t directly related to UCLA and not
this story? If you saw the headline “White House reporter
quits amid scandal,” tell me you wouldn’t snatch up the
paper.
Mainly, the Daily Bruin and countless other smaller papers
buttressing the information pyramid didn’t run the story
because the Los Angeles Times and The New York Times didn’t
headline it, or even run it, when the story broke. Where it was
first run as news, in The Washington Post and on National Public
Radio, it only got blurb-sized attention.
“In the case of the Daily Bruin,” said Groeling,
“while I’m sure they tend to follow cues delivered by
the media heavies, if they really thought it was an important
story, I’m sure they’d cover it too.
“It’s not like The New York Times will send over
thugs to beat them up if they stray too far from the party
line.”
The problem is they don’t have to send thugs ““ they
let blind faith do the thugging, and there’s nothing funny
about that. For laughs, however, I leave you with a question asked
by an unidentified “reporter” from a recent White House
press briefing.
“Does this administration believe the Democratic leaders
are now engaged in a deliberate disinformation campaign as the best
way to undermine the president’s goals and objectives on a
number of issues?”
Lukacs is a third-year history student. E-mail him at
olukacs@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to
viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.