The News Is Broken

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" Zepp " <zepp

 

Sat, 12 Feb 2005 09:00:51 -0800

[Zepps_News] #Will Pitt: The News Is Broken

 

 

Over the past year or two, those of us who've come increasingly to

depend on the Internet for our news now recognize the name of William

Rivers Pitt as a vital writer of political essays. He's getting better

all the time, but I nominate yesterday's entry as his crowning

achievement thus far~~~

 

 

The News Is Broken

By William Rivers Pitt

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 11 February 2005

 

Once upon a time, working the White House Press Briefing Room was

the crown jewel of mainstream political journalism beats. That was it;

short of reporting live from under the President's desk or nailing down

an interview with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, you weren't going to get

a better gig if you were a political reporter.

 

To hold such a position was also to be the repository for a great

responsibility. If you are privileged enough to be placed there, if you

have put in the time as a reporter to earn the right to be there, you

are the first line of defense in the eternal struggle between the rights

and well-being of the people and governments that are always willing and

ready to lie, cheat and steal in our name and 'for our own good.'

 

All governments lie. That is what they do. A reporter in the White

House Press Briefing Room bears the burden of being the person whose

role it is to speak truth to power, to write down what happens after

speaking truth to power, and to beat their editors and publishers about

the head and shoulders to make sure that truth is delivered to the

people intact.

 

We perhaps like to imagine the men and women in that briefing room

- if we take the time to think of them at all - as people with big ears

and sharp eyes, with too many pens in their pockets, a rolodex with

every important name on the planet sitting on their desks, a hand well

used to holding a glass of scotch, an unspoken promise to keep sources

protected to the bitter end, and a bedrock sense of being beholden to

nothing and no one beyond the integrity and mission of their chosen

profession. 'Without Fear or Favor,' goes the refrain.

 

Something like that might have existed at one time in our history.

Certainly, careerism has always played a part in the reporting of any

journalist in that briefing room. Make the administration spokesperson

angry enough and he or she will pull your pass, thus humiliating you and

derailing your climb up the ladder. Probably a lot of reporters have let

important stories drop in order to preserve their access and their

careers, but the really good ones report the stuff anyway, and they wind

up being the ones asked to speak at the commencement for the Columbia

School of Journalism. Ask Seymour Hersh what it means to be a good

journalist. He can tell you.

 

Something like that might have once existed, but it is almost

completely gone now. The sad and sordid tale of Jeff " Don't Call Me

Guckert " Gannon " is a final nail in the coffin, as far as I am

concerned. This story went from irritating to outrageous to appalling to

downright nauseating and scary in rapid succession.

 

I went into great detail on the " Gannon " phenomenon in my blog

http://forum.truthout.org/blog/ , but this is it in a nutshell: An

avowed conservative partisan managed to boll-weevil his way into the

White House Briefing Room, where he was the go-to guy for administration

spokesman Scott McClellan whenever the questions from the press corps

got too hot for comfort. His final exposure came in exactly this

fashion, when he manufactured quotes by Senators Clinton and Reid in

order to score points off Democrats while hauling McClellan's chestnuts

out of the fire during a press briefing on Bush's hare-brained Social

Security plan. He managed to do this without even using his real name,

which is actually James Guckert.

 

" So what? " his defenders cry. It isn't as if one has to be anointed

by the saints to get a pass into the briefing room. On this, " Gannon's "

allies have a point. There are two kinds of passes for that room. To get

a hard pass, one has to attend the press gaggle four or five times a

week over the course of at least a month. In other words, you have to

work at it. To get a day pass, however, one has only to call the Media

Affairs Office, give them your social security number and whatever

credentials you can offer, and more often than not you can get in. You

don't need to be a saint to get in, or even a professional, apparently.

What you do once you get there is what matters.

 

This is how " Gannon " got in, and so long as he followed the

protocols with the media office, he had as much of a right to be in

there as any of the left-wing opinion writers who follow that same

procedure many times a year. One may question his ethics - his reports

were little more than cut-and-paste jobs from GOP press releases - but

it is hard to argue that he didn't belong in the room with the rest of

the day-passers.

 

" Gannon is being attacked for being gay, " say some of his

defenders. This comes from a prurient angle of the story that has

" Gannon " allegedly involved with gay prostitution websites, as reported

by a number of blogs and mainstream news sources. While the hypocrisy of

" Gannon's " possible involvement with gay escort services even as he

wrote some of the most virulently homophobic screeds to be found

anywhere - he at one point referred to John Kerry as being potentially

" the first gay President of the United States " - is enough to make one

choke, it is not the main tent. In truth, this angle of the story

deserves to be a sidelight in a much larger problem.

 

" The lefties are attacking Gannon because they don't like his

politics, " goes the defender's refrain. Here is where the train

decisively leaves the tracks, because " Gannon " wasn't just some gomer

who followed the procedure and is now being attacked for asking partisan

questions. In the catastrophically simplified

explain-it-to-me-like-I've-experienced-brain-death realm of television

news, however, that's as deep as the analysis has gone.

 

" Gannon " was on with Wolf Blitzer and CNN Thursday evening, and

Blitzer didn't even try to pose a hard question. He merely stepped aside

and let " Gannon " pule. " Gannon " was allowed to paint himself as the

victim in all this. Blitzer even went so far as to say that he

absolutely didn't understand one key facet of the story, and just let

" Gannon " frame it as he pleased. It was as luxurious a backrub as has

ever been broadcast. The other 'reporter' involved in that CNN report

was Howard Kurtz, who had earlier in the day stated emphatically that

there was nothing at all to this story. He knew this because he had

asked Scott McClellan about it, and McClellan said that was the deal.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

 

And therein lies the rub. If " Gannon " were getting zapped for

simply being a conservative reporter who filed boilerplate GOP talking

points as news, one could possibly have some sympathy for him even if

you find his views repugnant and his hypocrisy intolerable. Yet the real

issue at hand here has to do with the name Blitzer failed to bring into

the conversation: Valerie Plame.

 

Plame, you will recall, was the deep-cover CIA agent tasked to

track the sale and delivery of weapons of mass destruction to

terrorists. Plame was outed by two Bush administration officials, who

leaked word of Plame's secret career to Bob Novak and several other

journalists. They torpedoed her career deliberately as an act of revenge

against her husband, Joseph Wilson, who a week prior had exposed Bush's

claims of uranium from Niger being used to make bombs in Iraq as a whole

lot of smoke and nonsense. The breaking of Plame was also a

none-too-subtle warning to any other administration insiders who might

have been getting happy feet and were thinking of calling a reporter.

 

The Plame affair is, in the end, one of the grossest and most

despicably deliberate breaches of national security to come down the

pike in a long time. The perpetrators have thus far managed to slip the

noose because the journalists who received their little tip are standing

(correctly, in my opinion) behind the fundamental tenet of journalism: A

reporter must not be forced to reveal their sources. Former Illinois

U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has been tasked to investigate the

matter, and has issued subpoenas to the journalists in question. The

names involved are some of the most well-known in the news media.

 

" Jeff Gannon " has also been subpoenaed by Fitzgerald in the Plame

matter. That's where the train leaves the tracks.

 

According to the Washington Post, " Gannon " did an interview with

Joseph Wilson in October of 2003. In that interview, " Gannon " directly

referenced a secret internal CIA memo that named Valerie Plame as a

covert CIA operative. According to the Post story, " Gannon " was the only

reporter in the entire realm of journalism who had seen and read this

confidential CIA document. " Gannon " proudly bragged about his role in

outing Plame on the forums of the ultra-conservative website

FreeRepublic.com, posting under the subtle pseudonym 'Jeff Gannon.'

 

" Gannon " wasn't just some gomer who got a day pass. He had serious

access, as displayed by his knowledge of a CIA memo that no one else had

ever heard of or seen. He bragged publicly about playing a key role in

an act of treason perpetrated by members of this administration,

something he would not have been able to do had he not had friends

inside the Bush White House. Scott McClellan claims to not know him. I,

for one, think that is a bald-faced lie.

 

This is journalism today, and " Gannon " isn't alone in disgrace.

Conservative columnist Armstrong Williams got paid more than a quarter

of a million dollars by the Bush administration to peddle No Child Left

Behind. Conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher got $21,500 to peddle

Bush's ideas on marriage. Conservative columnist Mike McManus got

$10,000 to pitch the same policy as Gallagher.

 

This particular administration can't sell its policy initiatives on

the merits, but has to pay journalists to pimp them by proxy. As bad as

that is, it is far worse to know that there are journalists out there

who would willingly play that role. Most of them don't even have to get

paid to preach the party line. The aforementioned careerism, and the

simple fact that a lot of 'reporters' these days are little more than

vapid, blow-dried spokesmodels trying to get famous, is enough to get

too many of them to roll over and sing for their supper.

 

Wolf Blitzer and Howard Kurtz got ten minutes of television time

with a guy who was involved in blowing the cover of a CIA operative

tasked to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of

terrorists, and the best they could do was to let him talk about how sad

he is that all these bad people are after him. That pretty much says it

all. The combination of careerism, an absence of journalistic standards,

and the notorious allergy the mainstream media has when it comes to

self-critique, has proven to be a poisonous cocktail.

 

Some of my co-workers and friends have said they think I should try

to get one of those day-passes to the briefing room, to see if it is as

easy as it sounds. Once upon a time, the very idea of walking into the

White House Press Briefing Room and raising my hand with the rest of the

crush would have kept me awake nights in giddy anticipation. To walk in

the footsteps of giants, at least in my profession, would have felt akin

to striding to the high-rollers table in the best casino in Vegas with a

fat wad of bills and an eye for the opening.

 

After " Gannon " , after Williams, after Gallagher, after McManus,

after Wolf and Howie, after seeing what corporate conglomerate ownership

of journalism has done to a once-honorable calling, after watching this

administration ruthlessly exploit the glaring cracks in what we call

reporting today, I don't feel that way anymore. Today, walking into the

White House Press Briefing Room would make me feel like a cheapjack slot

jockey sneaking into a crummy casino on the dusty end of the strip,

hoping to hustle a few chips from a dealer who knows the table is

already fixed.

 

I know there are still reputable journalists, men and women of

integrity, working that room. Those are the people who need to raise the

hue and cry on this matter, before it is too late. What is happening in

American journalism, and in that most important of rooms, is a lessening

of us all, and it is very, very dangerous.

 

© Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021105A.shtml

--

 

 

 

Election 2004

The Triumph of the Swill

" The National Government will regard it as its first and foremost

duty to revive in the nation the spirit of unity and cooperation.

It will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our

nation has been built. It regards Christianity as the foundation

of our national morality, and the family as the basis of national

life. "

Adolph Hitler, My New World Order,

Proclamation to the German Nation

at Berlin, February 1, 1933

 

 

Not dead, in jail, or a slave? Thank a liberal!

Pay your taxes so the rich don't have to.

 

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