Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 09:00:51 -0800
From: Zepp <zepp@finestplanet.com>
Subject: #Will Pitt: Breaking the News

Over the past year or two, those of us who've come increasingly to
depend on the Internet for our news now recognize the name of William
Rivers Pitt as a vital writer of political essays. He's getting better
all the time, but I nominate yesterday's entry as his crowning
achievement thus far~~~

The News Is Broken
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 11 February 2005

Date: Sat, 12 Feb 2005 09:00:51 -0800
From: Zepp <zepp@finestplanet.com>
Subject: #Will Pitt: Breaking the News

Over the past year or two, those of us who've come increasingly to
depend on the Internet for our news now recognize the name of William
Rivers Pitt as a vital writer of political essays. He's getting better
all the time, but I nominate yesterday's entry as his crowning
achievement thus far~~~

The News Is Broken
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 11 February 2005

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.

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

I went into great detail on the "Gannon" phenomenon in my blog
http://forum.truthout.org/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 McClellan 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 McClellan'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.

"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.

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.

"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.

"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.

"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 McClellan about it, and McClellan said that was the deal.
Move along. Nothing to see here.

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.

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.

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.

"Jeff Gannon" has also been subpoenaed by Fitzgerald in the Plame
matter. That's where the train leaves the tracks.

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.'

"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 McClellan claims to not know him. I,
for one, think that is a bald-faced lie.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

© Copyright 2005 by TruthOut.org
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/021105A.shtml

The News Is Broken
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 11 February 2005

Once upon a time, working the White House Press Briefing Room

the crown jewel of mainstream political journalism beats. That was

short of reporting live from under the President's desk or nailing

an interview with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, you weren't going to

a better gig if you were a political reporter.

After "Gannon", after Williams, after Gallagher, after McManus,
after Wolf and Howie, after seeing what corporate conglomerate

of journalism has done to a once-honorable calling, after watching

administration ruthlessly exploit the glaring cracks in what we call
reporting today, I don't feel that way anymore. Today, walking into

White House Press Briefing Room would make me feel like a cheapjack

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.

The News Is Broken
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Friday 11 February 2005
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.