- 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.
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- 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.'
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- I went into great detail on the "Gannon"
phenomenon in my 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 McLellan
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 McLellan'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.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- "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.
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- "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.
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- "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 McLellan about it, and McLellan said that
was the deal. Move along. Nothing to see here.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- "Jeff Gannon" has also been subpoenaed
by Fitzgerald in the Plame matter. That's where the train leaves the tracks.
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- 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.'
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- "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 McLellan claims to not know
him. I, for one, think that is a bald-faced lie.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally
bestselling author of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't
Want You to Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.'
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- © : t r u t h o u t 2005
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