From The News-Record (NC), 3/6/05:
http://www.news-record.com/news/columnists/staff/h3cone_030605.htm

Edward Cone: When the news is literally the party line


The Soviets called their party newspaper Pravda -- "Truth."

Americans used to laugh at that kind of phony journalism.

But more and more, the joke is on us.

Think it can't happen here?

Click to the Web site of the Transylvania County Republican Party for
a look at things to come.

The official page for this western North Carolina political
organization carries national news from an outfit called GOPUSA.

The same news service feeds headlines and articles to at least a
half-dozen other county GOP sites across North Carolina, and many more
across the nation.

It's a tidy little news network, hewing close to the party line,
self-contained and free from the impure thoughts so common to the
mainstream press.

A partner company to GOPUSA, called GOPweb, even designs and hosts
many of the sites, including the one in Transylvania County.

And until recently, this network had its very own White House
correspondent.

He reported with the zeal of a Pravda stringer, lobbing softball
questions at press conferences and quoting administration press
releases verbatim in his articles.

He called himself Jeff Gannon.

"Gannon" has been in the (real) news a lot lately, but this time as
the subject of coverage.

It turns out that his name is Jim Guckert and that he is a minimally
experienced journalist who obtained his press passes in clear
violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the policies covering
White House access.

Talon News, the dummy organization for which he worked, was an
offshoot of GOPUSA, itself the creation of a Texas Republican activist
named Bobby Eberle who boasted close ties to the Bush administration.

Guckert was also discovered to have worked as a male escort and to
have posted nude photos of himself at a Web site promoting his
services.

It has been misreported that liberal bloggers somehow dug up those
photos and outed Guckert, as if he wasn't already advertising his
wares on the Internet.

Questions about the Bush administration's background-check proficiency
abound, as he claimed to have access to sensitive documents.

Certainly we can add a new definition of the term "house organ," and
it's fun to imagine the hyperventilation of the commentariat had
someone working as an alleged gay prostitute been so welcomed by the
Clinton White House.

But Guckert's avocation is the least-creepy aspect of this story.
Talon News has been shut down and Eberle exposed, er, shown to be a
propagandist.

Yet the Guckert saga is not an isolated series of events.

Instead, it is the latest example of a media strategy built not just
on spinning a message, but on co-opting the mechanisms of message
delivery.

It is a strategy that goes well beyond Guckert to include seemingly
independent commentators such as Armstrong Williams, the former High
Point businessman and semi-famous opinion journalist who was paid
$240,000 to promote Bush's education policy.

The Bush administration has also released tapes featuring
faux-reporters touting its Medicare proposals, which have been shown
during some local news broadcasts; this TV tactic was recently adopted
by Gov. Schwarzenegger in California.

"Post press," the writer and New York University journalism professor
Jay Rosen calls the Bush administration, identifying some new
phenomenon beyond the antipathy for uncooperative journalists felt by
every president.

"Hating the press is normal behavior in the White House," says Rosen
at his Web log, PressThink.

"There's a difference between going around the press in an effort to
avoid troublesome questions, and trying to unseat the idea that these
people, professional journalists assigned to cover politics, have a
legitimate role to play in our politics."

There is a certain can-do spirit to the Republican build-your-own
media project that is very much of its era.

Bloggers and other nontraditional reporters surely will follow Guckert
to the White House.

Corporations have inserted the word "infomercial" into our
vocabularies, when "long ad" would work just fine.

And news already has been repurposed and repackaged as comedy on "The
Daily Show" and commentary on Fox News.

I expect both political parties will continue down the Pravda path
with increasing sophistication.

One big difference between the old Soviet Union and the land of the
First Amendment is that the party-line press cannot exist here in a
vacuum.

Serious reporters, working for organizations or as independents, are
able to expose scripted news and the agenda behind it.

And with increased transparency into the news-making process a big
promise of the new media, that process should only intensify.

Over time, that ought to lessen the credibility of the scripters, but
it won't stop them from trying to manipulate the news.

Eternal vigilance being the price of liberty, informed skepticism
toward government-issue news is an ongoing obligation of Americans.

_______________________________________________________

Harry