White House liberally plays with truth
Clarence Page, chicagotribune.com from the Web, February 23, 2005
Washington -- If America's mainstream media were as liberal as conservatives claim we are, we would be
ballyhooing the fiasco of James D. Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, with page-one banner headlines and hourly bulletins.
Sure, Guckert-gate may seem like a tempest in a teapot, at first. But so did the Whitewater land development
deal. Yet, conservative commentators and editorialists, aided by their allies in Congress, rode that Arkansas
pony until it ended far afield of a land deal and the impeachment of a president for lying about sex.
Imagine, then, how the conservative choir would sing out at this point if a Democratic White House knocked
long-tenured journalists off its pressroom access lists so that it could give access to a fellow like Guckert,
who dependably asks softball questions because he reports for a partisan Web site that supports the administration.
Imagine how they would question the access given by Secret Service and the White House press office for
two years to a guy who used a driver's license that said James Guckert to get into the White House and
then switched to his alter ego of Jeff Gannon. The best explanation for this that Bush press secretary
Scott McClellan could give to Editor & Publisher magazine was, "People use aliases all the time in life,
from journalists to actors." Guckert wrote under the name Jeff Gannon for Talon News, a conservative
online news outlet associated with another Web site, GOPUSA, a conservative Web site based in Houston and
dedicated to "spreading the conservative message throughout America."
He attracted the attention of liberal bloggers when he asked President George W. Bush a squeezably soft
question at a news conference in January: How, he asked the president, could he work "with people who
seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" Liberal bloggers also uncovered links between Guckert and
gay-oriented Web sites.
But all that's a titillating sideshow compared to the charges that House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.)
has called to the attention of the special prosecutor investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as
a CIA operative to columnist Robert Novak. In 2003 Guckert wrote in Talon News that he had asked Plame's
husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, about "an internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence
personnel" that revealed his wife's CIA role.
Revealing a CIA agent's identity is a federal crime. A Time magazine reporter and a New York Times reporter
face possible jail sentences for refusing to say who revealed Plame's CIA role to them in an apparent effort
to discredit Wilson's criticism of the administration's Iraq war policy. Is the prosecutor putting Guckert's
feet to the fire, too? If not, why not?
Of course, every administration tries to manipulate the media. Team Bush has elevated it to a high art. Before
Guckert, there was the disclosure that three conservative syndicated columnists had been paid handsomely to
promote administration programs -- payment they failed to disclose to readers.
And remember those pre-packaged video news releases featuring fake reporters so local news outlets would be
tempted to run them as legitimate news stories, as some did? But I thought the last straw was the unprecedented
herding of reporters covering this year's inaugural balls into pens from which they could only venture to
interview ball guests if they were escorted by "minders" in the fashion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Tell me
again: What was that war about? Oh, yeah: freedom and democracy. Great. We could use a little more back here at home.
Unfortunately, this administration and its supportive chorus is getting away with less accountability, more
secretiveness, partly by demonizing the media. If they succeed in intimidating us from watchdogs into lapdogs,
they will have succeeded where previous administrations from both parties have failed.
That's why, despite the Guckert fiasco, I do not begrudge Web journalists from the right or the left or the squishy
middle their access to government pressrooms. I want to see more access, not less, granted to a press corps that
is as diverse as the people we serve.
More media access means more government accountability. But, when media watchdogs are intimidated into becoming
lapdogs, as some wise wit once said, that's not reporting; that's just taking dictation.
Clarence Page is a syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist based in Washington.
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