[Reader-list] reporting on reporting: frank rich on the 'war on journalism'

[Curt Gambetta]

I don't know if anyone has been following the
unfolding reportage on 'fake' or propagandist
reporting in the US... The layers and layers of
reporting as a kind of choreographed theatre of the
Bush admin, the right wing agenda and the even grayer
corporate news media agenda have been somewhat
disassembled by commentators such as Rich... the
loveliest snippet in this piece is Wolf Blizter (the
king of alarmism and crisis) interviewing a porn
star-turned White House reporter... read on...

curt

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/20/arts/20rich.html?ei=5070&en=066a75b566d01bf4&ex=1109307600&pagewanted=all&position=

FRANK RICH
The White House Stages Its 'Daily Show'

Published: February 20, 2005

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?"
	
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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.

The money that paid for both the Ryan-Garcia news
packages and the Armstrong Williams contract was
siphoned through the same huge public relations firm,
Ketchum Communications, which itself filtered the
funds through subcontractors. A new report by
Congressional Democrats finds that Ketchum has
received $97 million of the administration's total
$250 million P.R. kitty, of which the Williams and
Ryan-Garcia scams would account for only a fraction.
We have yet to learn precisely where the rest of it
ended up.

Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the
six known shills is only a small piece of the
administration's overall propaganda effort. President
Bush wasn't entirely joking when he called the
notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press
conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion "scripted"
while it was still going on. (And "Jeff Gannon"
apparently wasn't even at that one). Everything is
scripted.

The pre-fab "Ask President Bush" town hall-style
meetings held during last year's campaign (typical
question: "Mr. President, as a child, how can I help
you get votes?") were carefully designed for
television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last
summer in New York's Daily News, "unsuspecting
viewers" tuning in their local news might get the
false impression they were "watching a completely open
forum." A Pentagon Office of Strategic Influence,
intended to provide propagandistic news items, some of
them possibly false, to foreign news media was shut
down in 2002 when it became an embarrassing political
liability. But much more quietly, another Pentagon
propaganda arm, the Pentagon Channel, has recently
been added as a free channel for American viewers of
the Dish Network. Can a Social Security Channel be far
behind?

It is a brilliant strategy. When the Bush
administration isn't using taxpayers' money to buy its
own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out
and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans
what is happening in what is, at least in theory,
their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington
Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was
assigned "minders" - attractive women who wouldn't
give him their full names - to let the revelers know
that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted
to say anything remotely off message.

The inability of real journalists to penetrate this
White House is not all the White House's fault. The
errors of real news organizations have played
perfectly into the administration's insidious efforts
to blur the boundaries between the fake and the real
and thereby demolish the whole notion that there could
possibly be an objective and accurate free press.
Conservatives, who supposedly deplore post-modernism,
are now welcoming in a brave new world in which it's a
given that there can be no empirical reality in news,
only the reality you want to hear (or they want you to
hear). The frequent fecklessness of the Beltway gang
does little to penetrate this Washington smokescreen.
For a case in point, you needed only switch to CNN on
the day after Mr. Olbermann did his fake-news-style
story on the fake reporter in the White House press
corps.

"Jeff Gannon" had decided to give an exclusive TV
interview to a sober practitioner of by-the-book real
news, Wolf Blitzer. Given this journalistic
opportunity, the anchor asked questions almost as soft
as those "Jeff" himself had asked in the White House.
Mr. Blitzer didn't question Mr. Guckert's outrageous
assertion that he adopted a fake name because "Jeff
Gannon is easier to pronounce and easier to remember."
(Is "Jeff" easier to pronounce than his real first
name, Jim?). Mr. Blitzer never questioned
Gannon/Guckert's assertion that Talon News "is a
separate, independent news division" of GOPUSA. Only
in a brief follow-up interview a day later did he ask
Gannon/Guckert to explain why he was questioned by the
F.B.I. in the case that may send legitimate reporters
to jail: Mr. Guckert has at times implied that he
either saw or possessed a classified memo identifying
Valerie Plame as a C.I.A. operative. Might that memo
have come from the same officials who looked after
"Jeff Gannon's" press credentials? Did Mr. Guckert
have any connection with CNN's own Robert Novak, whose
publication of Ms. Plame's name started this
investigation in the first place? The anchor didn't go
there.

The "real" news from CNN was no news at all, but it's
not as if any of its competitors did much better. The
"Jeff Gannon" story got less attention than another
media frenzy - that set off by the veteran news
executive Eason Jordan, who resigned from CNN after
speaking recklessly at a panel discussion at Davos,
where he apparently implied, at least in passing, that
American troops deliberately targeted reporters. Is
the banishment of a real newsman for behaving
foolishly at a bloviation conference in Switzerland a
more pressing story than that of a fake newsman
gaining years of access to the White House (and
network TV cameras) under mysterious circumstances?
With real news this timid, the appointment of Jon
Stewart to take over Dan Rather's chair at CBS News
could be just the jolt television journalism needs. As
Mr. Olbermann demonstrated when he borrowed a sharp
"Daily Show" tool to puncture the "Jeff Gannon" case,
the only road back to reality may be to fight fake
with fake. 


		
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