The whole set-up was too sloppy though, wasn’t it? Was it the sloppiness of desperation, or could there be a method to the madness?
The male prostitute angle takes the focus off the Plame angle.
BTW, is anything ever going to break re the Plame investigation?
When did Guckert attend the Leadership Institute Broadcast Journalism School seminar? Perhaps the institute made a deal where advanced candidates were given day passes to the white house press room?
Seems that Gannon agrees that it can be hard to get access, or rather, there are “many obstacles for admittance.” How Gannon/Guckert/whatever it is this week overcame said obstacles, he isn’t at liberty to disclose.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1123257/posts?page=33#33
I think Mr. Gannon’s primary role was to (a) feed softball questions to the White House, giving them opportunities to reply with well-crafted daily sound bites in the evening news, and (b) to start spreading whatever bushit rumors the Administration want distributed.
That said, given the cowardice this Administration has shown in the last five years to any unscripted interview or unplanned public event, the idea that they’d go far enough to plant reporters in the Press Corps doesn’t surprise me one iota. This is the same Administration that had a hissy fit just because a reporter from Ireland dared to treat George with something other than kid gloves…
Rethink what, me saying I’m unsure about something??
Anyways I’m not really sure I see a clear cut gain to the administration’s actions in reference to the news media.
Things like hiring Anderson Williams to advertise for the No Child Left Behind initiative and giving day passes to James Guckert to me seem like things that cause a lot more trouble then they would be worth.
Even if Anderson Williams was never called out for receiving $240,000 from the Dept. of Education and this Guckert story never made big headlines, how much did the administration really gain from all this? Ultimately I think good old fashioned press corp. management with a more hands off approach would probably have gotten more or less equivalent results for the White House. You can find a lot of legitimate journalists who will tend towards softball questions. You won’t be able to tailor make their questions but in all honesty I don’t think the hoi polloi really pays much attention to the distinction between Bush answering a journalist’s question and Bush just outright voicing an opinion in a speech.
I think a lot of the White House public relations stuff is too “hands on” and just plain “excessive micromanagement.”
I actually have no moral problem with them doing it though. To me the media is just the fourth estate (politicians, corporations, bureaucracy, media.) The media is very much out for its own interests and doesn’t have the real interests of the people it claims to be trying to educate at heart. The media is there to make money, and they will do anything to stir up controversy, even when said controversy has no real relevance to anything of true national importance, but rather only relevance to the people’s hunger for a juicy bit of gossip.
Like the other “estates” the media has a purpose, but I don’t put them on any sort of pedastal. I don’t trust a journalist anymore than I do a corporate executive or a politician. In certain aspects I will trust them more, but in other aspects I will trust them less.
If politicians want to aggressively try to manage the media I feel that can be their prerogative and I don’t think we as a society are harmed by it. Distracting the people with propaganda is a key element to successfully running a Republic. In all honesty if everyone listened to everything we’d be in a quagmire and our government wouldn’t run very well at all.
Well, there you have it folks. It’s right and proper for democratic governments to lie, cheat, steal and smear to get their own way. Unless it’s a Democrat Administration I bet.
Well, as to how Guckert overcame the obstacles … he IS a male prostitute… I’ve always had my suspicions about this administration … not that there’s anything wrong with that … unless it’s done by people who publicly oppress gays … which, now that I think about it …
Jonathan:
I’m not sure if I understand what you intend here, but if I interpret you correctly, you mean that it would be highly irregular for someone with Gannon’s credentials to be called upon during press briefings.
Or do you mean the fact that he was called upon often gainsays the charge that he was just some sort of right-wing fringe blogger?
Martin:
Well, Gannon seems to have served two primary functions. First, he appears to have acted as a kind of “lifeline” for McClellan when the latter was under pressure from more critical reporters. Second, he asked loaded, softball questions that gave McClellan a regular opportunity to use at least some of the press conference time as an uncontested platform for administration talking points. In other words, he was (possibly) just a further extension of the “filtration system.”
That said, I’m not sure the scandal regarding Gannon’s access to the press briefings originates with the administration directly. It sounds more like the workings of a Texas Republican “Good Old Boys” network to me; the head of Talon News (can’t remember his name at the moment) called in a few favors, maybe. Had Gannon been less intrusive at the briefings, and had he not gotten hold of the secret Plame memos, then this whole issue would probably be a wash.
Odd, I always thought the politicians worked for us, not the other way around.
My experience has also been that most people don’t like being lied to. How is it that you do?
Well, now there’s evidence that Gannon had access to the White House Press Corps prior to his working as a reporter for Talon News. In other words, Gannon was given access despite the fact that he wasn’t a journalist.
Link here
Snip:
“There’s now documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as early as February 2003. Guckert, using his alias “Jeff Gannon,” once boasted online about asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing. The date is significant because in order to receive a White House press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary Scott McClellan, “published regularly,” in itself an extraordinarily low threshold.”
See also here
““If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.””
Joseph Goebbels
So the Bush Admin is stupid as well as corrupt. What’s your point?
That might be the attitude of management – the MBAs at the top of a news organization’s hierarchy – but reporters and editors have a very strong sense of public service as essential to their professional ethics. I’ve worked as a reporter and I never met one who didn’t feel that way.
:dubious: This is a whoosh, right?
I’d like to think there’s a difference between “the media” and “the news.”
“The media” is out to give the masses something to watch/hear/read, and make money doing so. If dishing up controversay (or Michael Jackson) is what it takes, then so be it.
“The news” is out to inform the masses, and give them all information possible so they can make decisions based on the facts.
The problem, of course, is that the lines between the two are now heavily blurred, elevating “entertainment” to headline-worthy material, and allowing leaders to “sell” policies as if it was little more than a new brand of detergent – except, of course, that detergent doesn’t usually end up killing thousands of people and leaving the nation $80 billion poorer.
Sometimes I think the US needs our equivalent of the BBC…
C’mon, you already know the answer. Anything that Bush does MUST be excused.
The first. It was my experience (all under the Clinton administration, admittedly) that even if one of the ‘smaller’ press could get access (which can be done) it would be exceedingly rare for such a one to get called upon.
I don’t think right and wrong come into it from a moral perspective. In fact I don’t look at government morally speaking, I’m a dyed in the wool realist and have always been so. Morals just don’t enter the equation (I find arguments about kleptocratic crony capitalism and arguments about the “evil” of abortion to be both equally stupid in a governmental sense.) I’m not trying to say I Have no morals. I have a moral compass and I judge what is right and what is wrong, morally. But I think if a government is working properly it is working in national self-interest, and I believe that a self-interested government might have need to lie to the people (I have no problem with FDR lying, for example, and he did so to advance national policy issues and he did so on a more personal level as well.)
However there is a difference between lying to advance what is seen as national self-interest and lying that hurts the nation. Nixon’s lies hurt the nation and that’s why he was a bad President, he wasn’t a bad President because it was “morally wrong” to do what he did. It was bad because it’s bad for the nation to be ran in that manner or with such recklessness in the use of the Federal government’s law enforcement agency.
You’re going to have to link your argument more clearly to what I said, I’m not really sure where you are going with your statements.
I said politicians might have need to lie, or take “questionable” action, I don’t see where I said politicians don’t work for us. Because politicians DO work for us, but they work for us because it is in their self-interest to do so.
Just because I lie to my boss doesn’t mean I don’t work for him. There may be times when it’s best for him not to know something, or I can do my job and help the company better by keeping something quiet.
To a degree and in certain instances I think every administration is stupid as well as corrupt. I don’t think that on the whole the Bush Administration is stupid, nor do I think they are substantially corrupt. This is more of a partisan area and I’m not going to debate if further with you in this trhead.
This is basically not something we can prove one way or the other. In my personal experience both from being hounded by reporters and from reading about the actions of reporters it seems most of them are interested in “getting the scoop” and career advancement, not a greater good.
I think there are journalists (most reporters aren’t journalists) that have some interest in helping society, but I think everything in the media can be boiled down to self-interest.
Certainly not. How easy would it be for FDR to say, “We need to attack Germany because if they come to control Europe without challenge then it puts us in grave danger, our situation in the world will be quite untenable” and expect wide public support for an invasion into Germany? Not very easy. Most Americans didn’t know anything about how states interact or how the world was growing interdependent. They needed to be fed bullshit and they were fed tons of it, look at some of the WWII propaganda films for a good laugh.
You mean PBS?
But the BBC is pretty biased as well, and they certainly show a bias on their website and on BBC America. I’m not Brit so I don’t know what the rest of their operations are like.
NPR and PBS are also biased despite some people I know trying to claim otherwise.
I wish there was a way we could get a source of factual reporting that wasn’t influenced by bias, we can’t. Even the decision to publish a story involves an editor filtering, and there’s always going to be a subtle bias even in the most good intentioned person.
Some papers (Christian Science Monitor is one) do a very good job of trying to balance what they report and avoid making moral judgments, but no group is perfect.
And most of them are interested in making money or prestige (and all operate on self-interest), whether they report “news” or entertainment.