• printer friendly
• mail this article
• iPod format
• digg

Photo

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.