Frank Rich: The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

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" Zepp " <zepp

 

 

Thu, 17 Feb 2005 07:31:08 -0800

Frank Rich: The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

 

 

 

 

<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/arts/20rich.html?pagewanted=1>

 

[Worth clicking to go to the second part of the story. It gets better...]

 

Frank Rich

 

The prayers of those hoping that real television news might take its cues

from Jon Stewart were finally answered on Feb. 9, 2005. A real newsman

borrowed a technique from fake news to deliver real news about fake news

in prime time.

 

Let me explain.

 

On " Countdown, " a nightly news hour on MSNBC, the anchor, Keith

Olbermann, led off with a classic " Daily Show " -style bit: a rapid-fire

montage of sharply edited video bites illustrating the apparent idiocy

of those in Washington. In this case, the eight clips stretched over a

year in the White House briefing room - from February 2004 to late last

month - and all featured a reporter named " Jeff. " In most of them, the

White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, says " Go ahead, Jeff, " and

" Jeff " responds with a softball question intended not to elicit

information but to boost President Bush and smear his political

opponents. In the last clip, " Jeff " is quizzing the president himself,

in his first post-inaugural press conference of Jan. 26. Referring to

Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton, " Jeff " asks, " How are you going to work

with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality? "

 

If we did not live in a time when the news culture itself is divorced

from reality, the story might end there: " Jeff, " you'd assume, was a

lapdog reporter from a legitimate, if right-wing, news organization like

Fox, and you'd get some predictable yuks from watching a compressed

video anthology of his kissing up to power. But as Mr. Olbermann

explained, " Jeff Gannon, " the star of the montage, was a newsman no more

real than a " Senior White House Correspondent " like Stephen Colbert on

" The Daily Show " and he worked for a news organization no more real than

The Onion. Yet the video broadcast by Mr. Olbermann was not fake. " Jeff "

was in the real White House, and he did have those exchanges with the

real Mr. McClellan and the real Mr. Bush.

 

" Jeff Gannon's " real name is James D. Guckert. His employer was a Web

site called Talon News, staffed mostly by volunteer Republican

activists. Media Matters for America, the liberal press monitor that has

done the most exhaustive research into the case, discovered that Talon's

" news " often consists of recycled Republican National Committee and

White House press releases, and its content frequently overlaps with

another partisan site, GOPUSA, with which it shares its owner, a Texas

delegate to the 2000 Republican convention. Nonetheless, for nearly two

years the White House press office had credentialed Mr. Guckert, even

though, as Dana Milbank of The Washington Post explained on Mr.

Olbermann's show, he " was representing a phony media company that

doesn't really have any such thing as circulation or readership. "

 

How this happened is a mystery that has yet to be solved. " Jeff " has now

quit Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but

because of other embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to

sites like hotmilitarystud.com and to an apparently promising career as

an X-rated $200-per-hour " escort. " If Mr. Guckert, the author of Talon

News exclusives like " Kerry Could Become First Gay President, " is yet

another link in the boundless network of homophobic Republican closet

cases, that's not without interest. But it shouldn't distract from the

real question - that is, the real news - of how this fake newsman might

be connected to a White House propaganda machine that grows curiouser by

the day. Though Mr. McClellan told Editor & Publisher magazine that he

didn't know until recently that Mr. Guckert was using an alias, Bruce

Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the

nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko, that " if Gannon was using an

alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his

cover. " (Otherwise, it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security

breach.)

 

By my count, " Jeff Gannon " is now at least the sixth " journalist " (four

of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist

on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length

ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or

broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have

been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health

and Human Services to promote the administration's " marriage "

initiatives. The other four have played real newsmen on TV. Before Mr.

Guckert and Armstrong Williams, the talking head paid $240,000 by the

Department of Education, there were Karen Ryan and Alberto Garcia. Let

us not forget these pioneers - the Woodward and Bernstein of fake news.

They starred in bogus reports ( " In Washington, I'm Karen Ryan

reporting, " went the script) pretending to " sort through the details " of

the administration's Medicare prescription-drug plan in 2004. Such

" reports, " some of which found their way into news packages distributed

to local stations by CNN, appeared in more than 50 news broadcasts

around the country and have now been deemed illegal " covert propaganda "

by the Government Accountability Office.

 

 

 

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