The issue of the ethics of journalism slides easily over into the issue of the practice of journalism. Or, rather, the lack of said practice. A number of people have raised the question "where is the mainstream media?" Media Matters for America noted on Tuesday that as of that day, not one of the five biggest circulation newspapers in the US (USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post) had weighed in editorially on the scandal, even though a number of smaller papers had. Bill Maher, expressing it more pointedly, said that if this had happened during the Clinton administration "tell me there wouldn't be crowds of people with torches and pitchforks."
The problem is not that the major media haven't covered the story at all - they have - but rather how it was covered. Gannongate has for the most part gotten the once-over-lightly treatment as if it was some kind of amusing curiosity, often approached as another "look at those bloggers go!" story: The "how" drowned out the "who" and the "what." That's perhaps not surprising from a media that almost invariably addresses political stories in terms of process rather than product, dwelling on the supposedly sexier notion of "how is so-and-so going to sell this" to the near-exclusion of just what it is that the old so-and-so is trying to sell. Not only is that easier (policy explanations take real work and the effort to understand the details), but, the media masters believe, it's also more interesting to viewers and readers, who get caught up in the game of "who's winning?" - which makes it, again they believe, more profitable for the parent corporation looking to the bottom line to see if this quarter's returns exceed the last quarter's.
That, I think, is why there have been no crowds with torches: With Clinton, the corporate media bosses knew they had an audience of paying customers of a certain sure size that would eagerly fill every seat in the Coliseum in hopes of seeing some bloodshed. The hatred of Bush is not the same - not on the same level and more importantly, not of the same type. Shrub is a smug creep but I strongly suspect that if he were to become more liberal in his policies, those on the left who despise him might be suspicious, but even so they would despise him less. With Clinton, the more conservative he acted ("ending welfare as we know it," the Defense of Marriage Act, bombing of Libya and Iraq, NAFTA, etc.) the more the right hated him. With Bush, the hatred is political. With Clinton, it was (and is) purely personal.
And so, too, it is with the adoration of Bush: It's purely personal. Back in October a survey by the Program on International Policy Attitudes revealed that many of Shrub's supporters not only didn't know what he did advocate, they actually thought he advocated things he didn't (but of which they approved). It's as if to a significant extent, people don't care what he believes; it's the pose, the attitude, that matters. The down-home persona this party-loving Ivy League frat boy has successfully donned makes people feel "he's one of us, he's an ordinary guy who proves that ordinary folks like us are good enough to be president," he speaks to that traditional strain of defensive anti-intellectualism that runs though our history. Any number of historians have remarked on how in our nation's youth we felt we were the objects of cultural condescension by Europeans (which we were) - but while the condescension has largely disappeared, the resentment of anyone "looking down their nose at me" lingers. The right has channeled that resentment into a celebration of "traditional values" - which actually means all the things that "everybody knows" are "true" whether they are or not - and rejection of anyone who challenges conventional wisdom as someone "who thinks they're smarter'n you." It's not a new thing; it's rather a more sophisticated (i.e., more effective) version of George Wallace's rants nearly 40 years ago against "pointy-headed intellectuals."
The point here is that going after Bush would be taken very personally by a sizeable number of people, as an attack not only on him but on their cherished notions of themselves - and these are angry, frustrated people who are more than willing to make their anger and frustration known. So - to return the original point - contrary to what many on the left seem to believe, it's not that the major corporate media necessarily favor Shrub, it's that they don't see the profit in going after him.
And that in turn may explain why the members of the mainstream media, whenever they do happen to break out of the "clever bloggers" box in covering Gannongate, keep shaking their heads, mystified as to "how somebody with his background could get into the White House." They present it as a security issue, a breakdown in the screening process, a perhaps disturbing but ultimately run-of-the-mill bureaucratic screwup of which some clever self-promoter took advantage. I find that telling because that is surely the least controversial of the story's interpretations, one that can be dealt with by some reassurances that no actual danger to anyone resulted, an announcement about tightened security clearances for the press, and a statement of renewed determination to keep us all safe, probably with a quick coda about this demonstrating the need for the increased powers the administration wants.
But I don't buy that version for a minute. This is a guy who had no - zero - journalistic background, who couldn't get a Congressional press pass because he didn't work for an actual news organization, who got a daily press pass to the White House (which is only supposed to be done for out-of-town reporters who can show some special need to get in the gates on that particular day) pretty much every day for about two years, who apparently started getting said passes even before he started working for the so-called "Talon News" - and did it all under an assumed name while simultaneously engaging in an illegal enterprise, i.e., prostitution. What's more, "Talon News" was a project of GOPUSA, an outfit so partisan that even Ari Fleischer - Ari Fleischer! - wanted reassurances that Talon News actually was independent. (Hardly. But he was assured it was.)
No, I do not and cannot believe that the vetting process was that - I can't find an appropriately emphatic adjective - incompetent. This was a set-up. Someone, I don't know who, told whoever it is that issues the passes "let this guy in." Let him in to toss softball question that Scott McClellan came to rely on for his topic-changing lifeline whenever he got pressed by the real reporters. Gannon even said that "Scott knows what he's going to get from me."
(By the way, Gannon's real name, as if you didn't know, is James Guckert. He says he used the alias because his real name "is hard to pronounce." "Guckert" is hard to pronounce? I dunno about that. Maybe he was referring to "James." That must be it.)
So the real question, as far as I'm concerned, is not how he got a pass but who arranged for it and why. For the softball questions, the feeding of GOPper talking points enabling McClellan to give the spin of the day? As a favor, a payback, to some political operative? Did he, as some have intimated, have a boyfriend in the White House? Going that route, I might be more likely to suspect someone a step removed, perhaps someone in GOPUSA or the RNC who then called in a favor on his behalf - except that if that's the case, how in hell did he get the scoops he did? (For example, he quoted from a CIA report that, apparently, no other reporter had seen in the course of challenging Joe Wilson's denial that his wife was involved in getting him assigned to go to Niger to check out the story that Saddam Hussein tried to buy yellowcake there. And he knew about the announcement of the start of the invasion of Iraq at least four hours before it was made. In fact, he not only knew the announcement was coming, he knew when.)
Jeff/James Gannon/Guckert clearly had a friend - not necessarily a boyfriend, but a friend - on the inside, if not in the White House, then high up in the RNC or in the office of some powerful GOP member of Congress, someone in a position to do him favors and feed him stories. This smells of backroom deals, corruption, favoritism, and conscious, deceitful manipulation of the news through plants willing to spread lies. In other words, like Shrub team SOP with just a little more of an edge.
That edge raises something else I wanted to mention. A number of lefty sites have gone to town about this with a lot of crowing about the White House being connected to a "gay male prostitute." In fact, there are a couple I've seen that seem to be incapable of mentioning the story without using some variant of that phrase at least once in every paragraph. I know that the intent is to express the sheer joy of finding the GOPpers in such blatant hypocrisy, eagerly embracing some of the very things - prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, criminality - they say are destroying the "traditional family values" they celebrate in word but not deed. But I have been made uncomfortable with the way some commentaries have run so very close to the edge, have run right up against implying that the fact that Jeff/James Gannon/Guckert (J. Gankert for short) is gay makes what he did somehow worse - particularly, that being a gay prostitute is somehow worse than being a straight prostitute.
Suppose the reporter was a straight woman but the circumstances otherwise identical, including the escort and porn sites with the naked and spread pictures. Now, you could argue that it reduces the White House hypocrisy a single rung because while it still involves prostitution, pornography, and criminality it doesn't involve homosexuality - but it that really the issue? Does the matter revolve around the fact that Gankert is gay? By playing up that angle, are we actually playing to the very prejudices for which we slam the wingers and which provide one of the bases for the charge of hypocrisy?
It is, admittedly, a hard call because that aspect can't be ignored precisely because it is part of the hypocrisy. Yet the other aspects speak to that hypocrisy just as loudly. So why does it seem, at least to me, that much more attention is being paid to Gankert being gay than being a prostitute, more time is being spend focusing on sexuality than pornography? I can't help but suspect that a significant part of the reason is that we think that's the part that will be more shocking to "red state" people. But, again, in so doing we run the risk of, pardon the cliche, validating the very bigotry we're exploiting. That way lies the Dark Side of the Force.
The issue, what we need to keep hammering on, is not gay prostitution! gay prostitution! Rather, it's hypocrisy! hypocrisy! It's you hypocrites! you hypocrites!
Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye are like unto whited sepulchres, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead [men's] bones, and of all uncleanness. - Matthew 23:27You are untrustworthy! Unreliable! Can't be trusted! Don't keep your word! Don't mean what you say!
Hypocrites!
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