Journalists are not like other people. They are always frenetic, often paranoid, and the good ones are usually kind of ugly.
Journalism is the kind of profession where all that matters is how good you are. You can’t buy a good journalism job with a brand-name degree or a high connection, although those things don’t hurt. You can count on working extremely long hours for very little pay and rarely being liked or appreciated by the world you have to cover.
But thousands of would-be muckrakers aim for a job in this very competitive field despite all the good reasons not to, and it’s not hard to see why. Good journalism — the kind that’s disappearing with ominous frequency these days — is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. Without it, there’s no one to check whether or not the people in power are doing what they say they are, or even if they are who they say they are. There’s no one to find out whether or not that major corporation is polluting only as much as it’s allowed. There’s no one to let us know that the same people who started a war are getting rich from it.
Of course, with the responsibility of journalism comes a huge set of ethics (the New York Times set, I believe, takes up almost 100 pages) that aim to keep the practice honest. Real journalism outlets — daily, metro newspapers, not including the San Diego Union-Tribune — follow ethical standards religiously, knowing that their credibility (and thus, hopefully, their circulation) depends on maintaining the public’s trust.
So good journalism is fundamental to a healthy democracy. What do you think the Bush administration is trying to do to it?
Surprise! — nothing good. James Dale Guckert, AKA Jeff Gannon, is a now-infamous former member of the White House press corps and symbol of the Bush administration’s utter disregard for the importance of a well-functioning fourth estate.
Gannon’s shiny top came under scrutiny a few weeks ago when he asked Bush a rather buttery question during an (extremely rare) White House press conference. Inquiring about working with congressional Democrats on the president’s Social Security project, Gannon quipped, “How are you going to work with people who have divorced themselves from reality?”
People on the Internet caught it first. Bloggers noticed the comment’s vicious partisanship and checked out its source. It turns out that Gannon was actually James Guckert, a reporter wannabe working for a conservative outfit called Talon News. Talon was closely associated with GOPUSA, a right-wing mouthpiece aimed at “bringing the conservative message to America.”
So Jeff Gannon didn’t actually exist, and James Guckert was not a real reporter. The former male escort was given day-pass press credentials to White House press conferences after officials checked to see only “that the news organization [he claimed to work for] existed.”
White House press credentials used to be reserved for top-level reporters working for established, independent news organizations — that is, back in the day when presidential administrations held regular press conferences and at least paid attention to what the media said about them. The Bush administration has held fewer press conferences than any other administration, fields only preapproved questions from reporters and was recently exposed for paying media pundits to blast its message.
Which makes Gannongate, as it is being called on the Internet, seem all the more disturbing. No well-informed person would really put it past the Bush administration to load its press corps up with cheerers, instead of the “mean” reporters who like to ask real questions. The scary thing about Gannongate is that it’s only part of the administration’s larger media strategy, which is to fundamentally fracture the American journalism establishment. Gannon and the pundit-payoff scandal, coupled with the administration’s blatant attempts to propagandize the American public, indicate something far more sinister than an effective way to “stay on message”: They show that the administration’s allegiance is not to the truth or to the American people but to its own partisan goals.
What, after all, does an honest, well-run and legitimate administration have to fear from a bunch of snotty reporters? The only other president who hated the papers as much as Bush was Nixon, and it wasn’t hard to see why when two of them caught him with his hands in the cookie jar.
Bush’s strategy is not just to fight the mainstream media but to slice it up along ideological lines so that there is no longer one set of facts. He wants all the red states watching Fox News and reading Talon and the blue states watching CBS (bon voyage, Mr. Rather) and reading the New York Times. When neither side can agree on even the most basic facts about administration policy (like whether or not there were prewar ties between Saddam and al-Qaida or whether weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq), the job is done. When the people in power have attacked any news outlet that gives people a message they don’t like, and the only newspeople you trust are the ones wearing your color, the democratic process has ended.
This has already happened. The most disturbing part of the whole Gannon story was how it managed to be the talk of both Washington, D.C., and the Internet while being almost completely ignored by the media outlets that should have been outraged by it. Only NBC and CNN have covered the story on TV; major newspapers around the country were silent about it on their news pages even while outraged writers sounded off on the op-ed side. This points to only one thing: For once, the Bush plan is working. Big journalism is so afraid of another Jayson Blair or Dan Rather — in other words, of losing credibility in the eyes of conservative viewers due to Bush propaganda — that it can’t even bring itself to yell mayday when its ship is under fire.
Bush’s “divide and conquer” plan for the American media must be stopped, but there is serious doubt as to whether or not anyone is powerful enough to stop it. When the integrity of some of the largest, oldest and most-respected news outlets in the world is utterly discounted by a large segment of the population and relentlessly attacked by a corrupt administration, will enough people listen if those same journalists say it has gone too far?
Warning: This column may not be suitable for conservative viewers.
E-mail me at [email protected].
