Media Finally Shows Concern over Bush and the Media

Well for the first time in some time the main stream media has decided that maybe, just maybe there is something a bit foul in the White House Press Corp, or it was a very slow news day. A story about the whole Gannon/Guckert scandal, compounded with the revelations that the Bush Administration has been paying for good press has made the front page of a major market newspaper.

The reporter here did a great job of posting the facts in the case, and the fact that it is on the front page, makes it a real story (Almost 5 weeks after it broke). If you took this whole saga, and replace the name Bush with Clinton, it would have taken less than 5 mines to make the front page.

The Gannon thing is debunking one of the greatest myths the republicans love to hang on to, that the media is a liberal haven, if so, you would think they would have jumped on this from day one, like the countless other scandals of the Bush Administration.


On the front page of the Philadelphia Inquirer, political analyst, Dick Polman wrote a story “White House stirs debate on media tactics."

Some excerpts,

And his employer, a conservative Web site operated by Texas Republican activists, having already erased all traces of "Gannon," announced Thursday that it was unplugging its Web site to "reevaluate operations."

But the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert saga is far from over. It remains unclear how a graduate of a conservative training program, someone with no previous journalism experience, someone whose writings were often lifted directly from White House press releases, still managed to gain access to the White House press room, where he spent two years lobbing gentle questions at the press secretary and the President.

And some political analysts who monitor President Bush's relations with the media insist that Gannon (who, referring to Democrats, recently asked Bush, "How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?") should not be viewed as an isolated case. Rather, they contend that Gannon is symptomatic of a broader White House strategy to undermine the traditional media by disseminating the Bush message in creative new ways.

Larry Gross, who runs the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California, says: "Richard Nixon hated the press, Bill Clinton hated the press - but they accepted the basic rules of the game. Bush has a strategy of discrediting, end-running, and even faking the news. Those prepackaged videos sent to local TV stations 'looked' like news, much the way Gannon 'looked' like a reporter. We're seeing something new: Potemkin-village journalism."