This guy is on it, and this show is devastatingly good. Highly recommended.

It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that’s not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It’s certainty. People love the president because he’s certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don’t seem to exist. It’s the fact that he’s certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?

AVC: You’re saying appearances are more important than objective truth?

SC: Absolutely. The whole idea of authority—authoritarian is fine for some people, like people who say “Listen to me, and just don’t question, and do what I say, and everything will be fine”—the sort of thing we really started to respond to so well after 9/11. ‘Cause we wanted someone to be daddy, to take decisions away from us. I really have a sense of [America’s current leaders] doing bad things in our name to protect us, and that was okay. We weren’t thrilled with Bush because we thought he was a good guy at that point, we were thrilled with him because we thought that he probably had hired people who would fuck up our enemies, regardless of how they had to do it. That was for us a very good thing, and I can’t argue with the validity of that feeling.

But that has been extended to the idea that authoritarian is better than authority. Because authoritarian means there’s only one authority, and that authority has got to be the President, has got to be the government, and has got to be his allies. What the right-wing in the United States tries to do is undermine the press. They call the press “liberal,” they call the press “biased,” not necessarily because it is or because they have problems with the facts of the left—or even because of the bias for the left, because it’s hard not to be biased in some way, everyone is always going to enter their editorial opinion—but because a press that has validity is a press that has authority. And as soon as there’s any authority to what the press says, you question the authority of the government—it’s like the existence of another authority. So that’s another part of truthiness. Truthiness is “What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.” It’s not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There’s not only an emotional quality, but there’s a selfish quality.

AVC: It seems like you’re actively cultivating a cult of personality on the show.

SC: That’s exactly what those are, these are all personality shows. It doesn’t matter what they’re saying. Doesn’t matter what the news is, it’s how this person feels about the news, and how you should feel about the news. It is also the personality. I’m not playing it nearly as hard as someone like O’Reilly or [Sean] Hannity does.

Read The Full Interview Here

The TPM reports that Time Warner hires Tom DeLay’s Chief of Staff as its head DC lobbyist to ‘improve relations’ with the GOP.

One keeps hearing about the so-called ‘liberal media’, but then, if that is the case, why are they so in cahoots with the Busheviks and the GOP in maneuvering legislation to garner them more power? If they were so hostile to conservative right, why would that same right wing be so wrapped up in manipulating the law to give these same media institutions ever increasing amounts of power? (such as the shenanigans that took place back in 2003 to increase media cross ownership provisions and caps on media assets, as just one example).

A Tale Told By An Idiot
By Eric Boehlert
Salon.com

March 31st, 2005

Wildly overplaying the Schiavo protesters, ignoring facts and giving Bush a free ride, the press was full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

It was fitting that reporters were in danger of outnumbering pro-life supporters outside Terri Schiavo’s hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Thursday morning. When one man began to play the trumpet moments after Schiavo’s death was announced at 9:50 a.m., a gaggle of cameramen quickly surrounded him, two or three deep.
Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a “furious debate” nationwide? That’s how Newsweek.com described the Schiavo story this week. Although it’s not clear how a country can have a “furious debate” when two-thirds of its citizens agree on the issue or, in the case of some Schiavo poll questions (i.e., Were Congress and President Bush wrong to intervene?), four out of five Americans agree.

But the “furious debate” angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream.

Clearly, the press went overboard in its around-the-clock coverage of the right-to-die case. But at this point, that type of exploitation is almost to be expected from news organizations, particularly television, desperate for compelling narratives that can be stretched out for days or weeks at a time. And it’s not fair to suggest that the Schiavo story was a manufactured one, or that it didn’t spark genuine interest. It did.

What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks as they pumped up what had been a long-simmering (seven years) family legal dispute and turned it into the most-covered story since a tsunami in Asia three months ago left approximately 300,000 people dead or missing. In the past two weeks the cable outlets and networks have mentioned “Schiavo” more than 15,000 times. By comparison, during the two weeks following the Asian humanitarian crisis, those same outlets mentioned “tsunami” approximately 9,000 times, according to TVEyes, the digital monitoring service. (As for television’s long-forgotten Iraq war, it garnered just 2,900 TV mentions over the two weeks that Schiavo mania ran rampant.)

Conservatives not only launched the story but were able to frame it and, at times, narrate it almost exclusively, as reporters and pundits, afraid of being tagged as liberal or anti-religion, were overly cautious about confronting pro-life Schiavo supporters about obvious factual errors in some of their statements. (Dr. Ronald Cranford, one of the two neurologists selected by Michael Schiavo to examine Terri, did not suffer the fools quite so gladly, however. Appearing on MSNBC on Monday, Cranford undressed host Joe Scarborough, who had been spinning fiction on behalf of pro-life supporters for days: “You don’t have any idea what you are talking about,” Cranford said.)

As the story played out on Page 1 nationwide, the press served as a platform for pro-life protesters. They were invited to sound off against tyrannical judges and Nazi-like politicians and denigrate Michael Schiavo at will while reporters eagerly transcribed protesters’ personal — and often outrageous — attacks, yet never dared to use the word “radical” to describe their actions.

And when it became clear that Americans were overwhelmingly opposed to the unprecedented intervention by Congress and the president, the press quietly looked the other way, once again proving that the Bush White House doesn’t have to worry about bad press — Beltway reporters still seem unwilling, or incapable, of delivering it.

Thursday afternoon, CNN began running a promo for its prime-time Schiavo special, “Life and Death: American Speaks Out.” Based on the rapid-fire images in the ad — one after another of pro-life protesters and spokesmen for various conservative groups — a better title might have been “Life and Death: America’s Conservative Minority Speaks Out.”

The Schiavo coverage was reminiscent of what followed the death last year of former President Ronald Reagan, when CNN and other news outlets simply handed over their airtime to conservatives for days at a time.

The Schiavo coverage started off with a strikingly deferential tone. For instance, on March 22 CNN’s John King, interviewing Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, “You say Congress has the authority. I don’t think anyone questions that, that Congress has the authority to grant federal jurisdiction for this case, if you will.” That statement was false — legions of legal scholars have noted that Congress has no authority to pass legislation in a specific legal case that effectively trumps state court findings.

Again and again CNN in particular seemed to do its best to accommodate the Pinellas Park noisemakers. Last week host Miles O’Brien adopted pro-life protesters’ language and began referring to Michael Schiavo as the “estranged husband.” As Media Matters for America noted, on March 24, CNN host Daryn Kagan said there are “a lot of people in this country agreeing with [pro-life protesters] that this would be a death without dignity.” Kagan added that there are “strong, divided opinions across the country.” Yet poll after poll showed that Americans were not strongly divided on this issue, and that most did not believe removing Schiavo’s feeding tube would mean death without dignity.

When pro-life supporters choreographed with police the arrest of several children outside Schiavo’s hospice, CNN reporter Bob Franken, in hushed tones, described the “poignant” scene. Remarking on the report on his Web site, James Wolcott wrote, “Franken’s sentimentalizing of this pious photo-op is more proof that the so-called [mainstream media] is so cautious about being respectful of religion that it refuses to recognize the raw face of fanaticism even when it’s filling the camera lens. Practically nothing is said about the backgrounds of the nutjob organizers of these sickly pseudo-events, leaving the impression that is simply People of Conscience converging on Florida to bear witness and catch some rays.”

It’s true that press outlets were very slow to pick up on the Sunday Charlotte Observer’s story that Scott Heldreth, a religious activist and antiabortion crusader who helped stage the children’s arrest outside Schiavo’s hospice, is a registered sex offender in Florida. “The former Naperville, Fla., resident remains listed on the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s sex offender registry,” the Observer reported.

Nor was much said about the background of Randall Terry, who became a constant presence on television as the Schindlers’ “family spokesman.” Viewers and readers heard almost nothing about Terry’s extremist background as an antiabortion activist who tried to present dead fetuses to Bill Clinton during the 1992 Democratic Convention and who has talked about his wish that one specific abortion provider be “executed.”

The press also downplayed references to a 2000 trial at which Schiavo’s extremely conservative Roman Catholic parents conceded that even if Terri had told them she would never want to be kept alive with a feeding tube, they would not have honored that request (an acknowledgment that goes a long way toward explaining their actions in the case). For the most part, the press portrayed Schiavo’s parents, Terry and the hospice protesters as simply being overly concerned and vaguely conservative. And nothing more.

Meanwhile, when polls found Americans aghast at the GOP’s power play and the Schiavo story fell apart politically for Republicans, the press appeared almost reluctant — or embarrassed — to point out how badly the GOP had blundered.

Fox News’ Brit Hume, clearly trying to downplay Bush’s role in the story, informed viewers, “I guess [Bush’s] intervention consisted mostly of a signature and some statements from the White House.” On CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Time reporter Karen Tumulty made a similar comment. Addressing a pro-life guest she noted, “You described the action of the Congress and the president as very restrained in this case, although the polls would indicate three-quarters of the American public thinks that the Congress in particular really went too far” (emphasis added). In fact, according to CBS’s own poll, Americans blamed both Bush and Congress equally, in part because pollsters asked about the action of “Congress and the president.”

Newsweek’s 2,500-word feature this week on Schiavo inserted this timid mention into the 14th paragraph of a 15-paragraph story: “Given polls showing solid majorities supporting the tube’s withdrawal, Republicans may have overplayed their hand” (emphasis added). The newsweekly did not mention that Bush’s job approval ratings have fallen to a new low in the wake of the Schiavo intervention.

It’s hard to imagine that if President Clinton (or a president Al Gore or John Kerry) had cut short his vacation to fly back to the White House in order to sign controversial legislation, and three days later network polls showed the legislation to be wildly unpopular, reporters would not have asked, How did the president become so out of touch with the mainstream? Who at the White House is to blame for the fiasco? How is the administration going to recover politically?

There was little or none of that critical analysis in Bush’s case. In fact, on Monday, on the heels of the Republicans’ first disastrous Schiavo week, the New York Times ran two detailed articles about the state of the White House. One chronicled how “confident,” “frisky” and “impishly fun” the president was feeling, and politely avoided any Schiavo references.

Running alongside that article was the umpteenth wet kiss directed toward White House political strategist Karl Rove, in which he was toasted for his mastery of political maneuvering. The article said that Rove was also now micromanaging the president’s schedule for political purposes — “deciding where Mr. Bush and other administration officials go as they crisscross the country trying to win public support.” It’s safe to assume that Rove played a role in Bush’s decision to fly back to the White House to sign the emergency Schiavo bill into law — a P.R. blunder yet unequaled in Bush’s second term. The Times remained obediently silent on that point as well.

And that’s when the paper wasn’t busy tipping its cap to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for his high-profile role in the Schiavo crisis. In a March 25 article, “In a Polarizing Case, Jeb Bush Cements His Political Stature,” the Times assured readers that “even critics said [Bush’s actions] were rooted in a deep-seated opposition to abortion and euthanasia rather than in political position.” The article, however, failed to name a single critic who agreed that Bush’s motives were rooted in deep-seated opposition to abortion. In fact, the one Democrat quoted in the story, Scott Maddox, departing as chairman of the Florida Democratic Party, blasted the governor: “This is less about Terri Schiavo and more about shoring up the Republican base, and that’s a shame. Politics has to be in play here.”

Then again, from the time the Schiavo story first became a Page 1 sensation, it took the New York Times eight days — and a couple of dozen articles — before one of its reporters informed readers that polls showed an overwhelming majority of Americans disapproved of federal attempts to intervene in the case.

The excessive media coverage of the Schiavo story wasn’t the most disturbing part. It was how, too often, journalists appeared to be afraid of the facts.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

An Opinionated Network
By Howard Kurtz
The Washington Post

In covering the Iraq war last year, 73 percent of the stories on Fox News included the opinions of the anchors and journalists reporting them, a new study says.

By contrast, 29 percent of the war reports on MSNBC and 2 percent of those on CNN included the journalists’ own views. These findings — the figures were similar for coverage of other stories — “seem to challenge” Fox’s slogan of “we report, you decide,” says the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

In a 617-page report, the group also found that “Fox is more deeply sourced than its rivals,” while CNN is “the least transparent about its sources of the three cable channels, but more likely to present multiple points of view.”

The project defines opinion as views that are not attributed to others.

Last March, Fox reporter Todd Connor said that “Iraq has a new interim constitution and is well on its way to democracy.” “Let’s pray it works out,” said anchor David Asman.

Another time, after hearing that Iraqis helped capture a Saddam Hussein henchman, Asman said: “Boy, that’s good news if true, the Iraqis in the lead.”

Fox legal editor Stan Goldman challenged Amber Frey’s hiring of attorney Gloria Allred, saying: “If you want to keep a low profile, Gloria is not the lawyer to represent you.”

In an interview, Fox’s executive daytime producer, Jerry Burke, says: “I encourage the anchors to be themselves. I’m certainly not going to step in and censor an anchor on any issue . . . You don’t want to look at a cookie-cutter, force-feeding of the same items hour after hour. I think that’s part of the success of the channel, not treating our anchors like drones. They’re number one, Americans, and number two, human beings, as well as journalists.”

CNN spokeswoman Christa Robinson says the study “reaffirms what anyone watching CNN already knows: CNN’s reporting is driven by news, not opinion.” MSNBC declined to comment.

The project, a Washington-based research group, offers a three-part breakdown of cable journalists voicing their opinions. From 11 a.m. to noon, this happened on 52 percent of the stories on Fox, 50 percent on MSNBC and 2.3 percent on CNN. Among news-oriented evening shows, journalist opinions were voiced on 70 percent of the stories on Fox’s “Special Report with Brit Hume,” due in part to its regular analysts’ panel at the show’s end; 9 percent on MSNBC’s “Countdown with Keith Olbermann,” and 9 percent on CNN’s “NewsNight with Aaron Brown.”

As for the most popular prime-time shows, nearly every story — 97 percent — contained opinion on Fox’s “O’Reilly Factor”; 24 percent on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews”; and 0.9 percent on CNN’s “Larry King Live.” King devoted nearly half his time to entertainment and lifestyle topics, twice as much as O’Reilly and more than three times as much as Matthews.

Read the rest of the article here…
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A33008-2005Mar14?language=printer

In Need of Thompson’s Savage Take
By Frank Rich
The International Herald Tribune

March 5th, 2005

New York - Two weeks ago Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide. This week Dan Rather commits ritual suicide, leaving the anchor chair at CBS prematurely as penance for his toxic National Guard story. The two journalists shared little but an abiding distaste - make that hatred in Thompson’s case - for the Great Satan of 20th-century American politics, Richard Nixon. The best work of both was long behind them. Yet memories of that best work - not to mention the coincidental timing of their departures - only accentuate the vacuum in that cultural category we stubbornly insist on calling News.

What’s missing from News in the United States is the news. On ABC, Peter Jennings devotes two hours of prime time to playing peek-a-boo with UFO fanatics, a whorish stunt crafted to deliver ratings, not information. On NBC, Brian Williams is busy as all get-out, as every promo reminds us, “Reporting America’s Story.” That story just happens to be the relentless branding of Brian Williams as America’s anchorman - a guy just too in love with Folks Like Us to waste his time looking closely at, say, anything happening in Washington.

Hunter Thompson did not do investigative reporting, but he would have had a savage take on our news-free world - not least because it resembles his own during the Nixon era, before he had calcified into the self-parodistic pop culture cartoon immortalized by Garry Trudeau, Bill Murray, Johnny Depp and most of his eulogists.

Read “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72″ - the chronicle of his Rolling Stone election coverage - and you find that his diagnosis of journalistic dysfunction hasn’t aged a day: “The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists.” He cites as a classic example the breathless but belated revelations of the mental history of George McGovern’s putative running mate, the Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton - a story that had long been known by “half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps.” This same clubby pack would be even tardier on Watergate, a distasteful assignment left to a pair of lowly police-beat hacks at The Washington Post.

Thompson was out to break the mainstream media’s rules. His unruly mix of fact, opinion and masturbatory self-regard may have made him a blogger before there was an Internet, but he was a blogger who had the zeal to leave home and report firsthand and who could write great sentences that made you want to savor what he found out rather than just scroll quickly through screen after screen of minutiae and rant. When almost all “the Wizards, Gurus and Gentlemen Journalists in Washington” were predicting an unimpeded victory march for Edmund Muskie to the Democratic presidential nomination, it was Thompson who sniffed out the Muskie campaign’s “smell of death” and made it stick. The purported front-runner, he wrote, “talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year’s crop.” But even Thompson might have been shocked by what’s going on now.

“The death of Thompson represents the passing from the Age of Gonzo to the Age of Gannon,” wrote Russell Cobb in a column in The Daily Texan at the University of Texas. As he argues, today’s White House press corps is less likely to be invaded by maverick talents like a drug-addled reporter from a renegade start-up magazine than by a paid propagandist like Jeff Gannon, a fake reporter for a fake news organization (Talon News) run by a bona fide Texas Republican operative.

Though a few remain on the case - Eric Boehlert of Salon, mediamatters.org, Joe Strupp of Editor and Publisher - the Gannon story is fast receding. In some major news venues, including ABC and CBS, it never surfaced at all. Yet even as Gannon has quit his “job” as a reporter and his “news organization” has closed up shop, the plot thickens. His own Web site - which only recently shut down with the self-martyring message “The voice goes silent” - has now restarted as a blog with Gonzo pretensions. The title alone of his first entry, “Fear and Loathing in the Press Room,” would send Thompson spinning in his grave had he not asked that his remains be shot out of a cannon.

As a blogger, Gannon’s new tactic is to encourage fellow rightist bloggers to portray him as the victim of a homophobic leftist witch hunt that destroyed his privacy. Given that it was Gannon himself who voluntarily exhibited his own private life by appearing on Web sites advertising his services as a $200-an-hour escort, that’s a hard case to make. But it is a clever way to deflect attention from an actual sexual witch hunt conducted by his own fake news organization in early 2004.

It was none other than Talon News that advanced the fictional story that a young woman “taped an interview with one of the major television networks” substantiating a rumor on the Drudge Report that John Kerry had had an extramarital affair with an intern. (Kerry had to publicly deny the story.) This is the kind of dirty trick only G. Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame could dream up. Or maybe did. Gannon’s Texan boss, Bobby Eberle, posted effusive thanks (for “their assistance, guidance and friendship”) to both Liddy and Karl Rove on Talon News’s sister site, GOPUSA, in December.

Gannon may well be a pawn of larger forces as the vainglorious Liddy once was. But to what end? A close reading of the transcripts of televised White House press conferences reveals that at uncannily crucial moments he was called on by the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, to stanch tough questioning on such topics as Abu Ghraib and Rove’s possible involvement in the outing of the CIA agent Valerie Plame.

We still don’t know how this Zelig, using a false name, was given a daily White House pass every day for two years. Last weekend, Jim Pinkerton, a former official in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, said on “Fox News Watch,” no less, that such a feat “takes an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House” and that “some investigation should proceed and they should find that out.”

Given an all-Republican government, the only investigation possible will have to come from the press. Which takes us back to 1972, the year of Thompson’s fear and loathing on the campaign trail. That was no golden age for news either. As Thompson’s Rolling Stone colleague, Timothy Crouse, wrote in his own chronicle of that year, “The Boys on the Bus,” months of stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein failed to “sink in” and only 48 percent of those polled by Gallup had heard of Watergate by Election Day.

Some news organizations had simply ignored The Post’s scoops “out of petty rivalry,” Crouse wrote. Others did so because they “feared the administration or favored Nixon in the presidential race.” Others didn’t initially recognize the story’s importance. (The New York Times played the Watergate break-in on page 30.) According to a superb new history of the Washington press corps, “Reporting from Washington,” by Donald Ritchie, even Rather, then CBS’s combative man in the Nixon White House, “left the Watergate story alone at first, sure that it would fade like ‘a puff of talcum powder.”‘

For similar if not identical reasons, journalistic investigations into the current administration rarely “sink in” either. Early stories in The Boston Globe and Washington Post on what Jeff Gannon himself (on his blog) now calls “Gannongate” faded like that puff of powder. But we’ve now entered a new twilight zone: In 1972, at least, the press may have been stacked with jokers but not with counterfeit newsmen.

“Reporting America’s Story,” NBC’s slogan, is what Thompson actually did before the phrase was downsized into a vacuous marketing strategy. As for Rather, he gave a valedictory interview to Ken Auletta of The New Yorker in which he said, “The one thing I hope, and I believe, is that even my enemies think that I am authentic.”

The bar is so low these days that authenticity may well constitute a major journalistic accomplishment in itself.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Bush Press Pal Quits Over Gay Prostitute Link
By Helen Kennedy
New York Daily News

A conservative ringer who was given a press pass to the White House and lobbed softball questions at President Bush quit yesterday after left-leaning Internet bloggers discovered possible ties to gay prostitution. “The voice goes silent,” Jeff Gannon wrote on his Web site. “In consideration of the welfare of me and my family, I have decided to return to private life.”
Gannon began covering the White House two years ago for an obscure Republican Web site (Talon-News.com). He was known for his friendly questions, including asking Bush at last month’s news conference how he could work with Democrats “who seem to have divorced themselves from reality.”

Gannon was also given a classified CIA memo that named agent Valerie Plame, leading to his grilling by the grand jury investigating her outing.

Read the rest of the story here…
http://ww w.nydailynews.com/front/story/279556p-239417c.html

The News Is Broken
By William Rivers Pitt
Truthout

February 11th, 2005

Once upon a time, working the White House Press Briefing Room was the crown jewel of mainstream political journalism beats. That was it; short of reporting live from under the President’s desk or nailing down an interview with the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, you weren’t going to get a better gig if you were a political reporter.
To hold such a position was also to be the repository for a great responsibility. If you are privileged enough to be placed there, if you have put in the time as a reporter to earn the right to be there, you are the first line of defense in the eternal struggle between the rights and well-being of the people and governments that are always willing and ready to lie, cheat and steal in our name and ‘for our own good.’

All governments lie. That is what they do. A reporter in the White House Press Briefing Room bears the burden of being the person whose role it is to speak truth to power, to write down what happens after speaking truth to power, and to beat their editors and publishers about the head and shoulders to make sure that truth is delivered to the people intact.

We perhaps like to imagine the men and women in that briefing room - if we take the time to think of them at all - as people with big ears and sharp eyes, with too many pens in their pockets, a rolodex with every important name on the planet sitting on their desks, a hand well used to holding a glass of scotch, an unspoken promise to keep sources protected to the bitter end, and a bedrock sense of being beholden to nothing and no one beyond the integrity and mission of their chosen profession. ‘Without Fear or Favor,’ goes the refrain.

Something like that might have existed at one time in our history. Certainly, careerism has always played a part in the reporting of any journalist in that briefing room. Make the administration spokesperson angry enough and he or she will pull your pass, thus humiliating you and derailing your climb up the ladder. Probably a lot of reporters have let important stories drop in order to preserve their access and their careers, but the really good ones report the stuff anyway, and they wind up being the ones asked to speak at the commencement for the Columbia School of Journalism. Ask Seymour Hersh what it means to be a good journalist. He can tell you.

Something like that might have once existed, but it is almost completely gone now. The sad and sordid tale of Jeff “Don’t Call Me Guckert” Gannon” is a final nail in the coffin, as far as I am concerned. This story went from irritating to outrageous to appalling to downright nauseating and scary in rapid succession.

I went into great detail on the “Gannon” phenomenon in my blog, but this is it in a nutshell: An avowed conservative partisan managed to boll-weevil his way into the White House Briefing Room, where he was the go-to guy for administration spokesman Scott McClellan whenever the questions from the press corps got too hot for comfort. His final exposure came in exactly this fashion, when he manufactured quotes by Senators Clinton and Reid in order to score points off Democrats while hauling McClellan’s chestnuts out of the fire during a press briefing on Bush’s hare-brained Social Security plan. He managed to do this without even using his real name, which is actually James Guckert.

“So what?” his defenders cry. It isn’t as if one has to be anointed by the saints to get a pass into the briefing room. On this, “Gannon’s” allies have a point. There are two kinds of passes for that room. To get a hard pass, one has to attend the press gaggle four or five times a week over the course of at least a month. In other words, you have to work at it. To get a day pass, however, one has only to call the Media Affairs Office, give them your social security number and whatever credentials you can offer, and more often than not you can get in. You don’t need to be a saint to get in, or even a professional, apparently. What you do once you get there is what matters.

This is how “Gannon” got in, and so long as he followed the protocols with the media office, he had as much of a right to be in there as any of the left-wing opinion writers who follow that same procedure many times a year. One may question his ethics - his reports were little more than cut-and-paste jobs from GOP press releases - but it is hard to argue that he didn’t belong in the room with the rest of the day-passers.

“Gannon is being attacked for being gay,” say some of his defenders. This comes from a prurient angle of the story that has “Gannon” allegedly involved with gay prostitution websites, as reported by a number of blogs and mainstream news sources. While the hypocrisy of “Gannon’s” possible involvement with gay escort services even as he wrote some of the most virulently homophobic screeds to be found anywhere - he at one point referred to John Kerry as being potentially “the first gay President of the United States” - is enough to make one choke, it is not the main tent. In truth, this angle of the story deserves to be a sidelight in a much larger problem.

“The lefties are attacking Gannon because they don’t like his politics,” goes the defender’s refrain. Here is where the train decisively leaves the tracks, because “Gannon” wasn’t just some gomer who followed the procedure and is now being attacked for asking partisan questions. In the catastrophically simplified explain-it-to-me-like-I’ve-experienced-brain-death realm of television news, however, that’s as deep as the analysis has gone.

“Gannon” was on with Wolf Blitzer and CNN Thursday evening, and Blitzer didn’t even try to pose a hard question. He merely stepped aside and let “Gannon” pule. “Gannon” was allowed to paint himself as the victim in all this. Blitzer even went so far as to say that he absolutely didn’t understand one key facet of the story, and just let “Gannon” frame it as he pleased. It was as luxurious a backrub as has ever been broadcast. The other ‘reporter’ involved in that CNN report was Howard Kurtz, who had earlier in the day stated emphatically that there was nothing at all to this story. He knew this because he had asked Scott McClellan about it, and McClellan said that was the deal. Move along. Nothing to see here.

And therein lies the rub. If “Gannon” were getting zapped for simply being a conservative reporter who filed boilerplate GOP talking points as news, one could possibly have some sympathy for him even if you find his views repugnant and his hypocrisy intolerable. Yet the real issue at hand here has to do with the name Blitzer failed to bring into the conversation: Valerie Plame.

Plame, you will recall, was the deep-cover CIA agent tasked to track the sale and delivery of weapons of mass destruction to terrorists. Plame was outed by two Bush administration officials, who leaked word of Plame’s secret career to Bob Novak and several other journalists. They torpedoed her career deliberately as an act of revenge against her husband, Joseph Wilson, who a week prior had exposed Bush’s claims of uranium from Niger being used to make bombs in Iraq as a whole lot of smoke and nonsense. The breaking of Plame was also a none-too-subtle warning to any other administration insiders who might have been getting happy feet and were thinking of calling a reporter.

The Plame affair is, in the end, one of the grossest and most despicably deliberate breaches of national security to come down the pike in a long time. The perpetrators have thus far managed to slip the noose because the journalists who received their little tip are standing (correctly, in my opinion) behind the fundamental tenet of journalism: A reporter must not be forced to reveal their sources. Former Illinois U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald has been tasked to investigate the matter, and has issued subpoenas to the journalists in question. The names involved are some of the most well-known in the news media.

“Jeff Gannon” has also been subpoenaed by Fitzgerald in the Plame matter. That’s where the train leaves the tracks.

According to the Washington Post, “Gannon” did an interview with Joseph Wilson in October of 2003. In that interview, “Gannon” directly referenced a secret internal CIA memo that named Valerie Plame as a covert CIA operative. According to the Post story, “Gannon” was the only reporter in the entire realm of journalism who had seen and read this confidential CIA document. “Gannon” proudly bragged about his role in outing Plame on the forums of the ultra-conservative website FreeRepublic.com, posting under the subtle pseudonym ‘Jeff Gannon.’

“Gannon” wasn’t just some gomer who got a day pass. He had serious access, as displayed by his knowledge of a CIA memo that no one else had ever heard of or seen. He bragged publicly about playing a key role in an act of treason perpetrated by members of this administration, something he would not have been able to do had he not had friends inside the Bush White House. Scott McClellan claims to not know him. I, for one, think that is a bald-faced lie.

This is journalism today, and “Gannon” isn’t alone in disgrace. Conservative columnist Armstrong Williams got paid more than a quarter of a million dollars by the Bush administration to peddle No Child Left Behind. Conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher got $21,500 to peddle Bush’s ideas on marriage. Conservative columnist Mike McManus got $10,000 to pitch the same policy as Gallagher.

This particular administration can’t sell its policy initiatives on the merits, but has to pay journalists to pimp them by proxy. As bad as that is, it is far worse to know that there are journalists out there who would willingly play that role. Most of them don’t even have to get paid to preach the party line. The aforementioned careerism, and the simple fact that a lot of ‘reporters’ these days are little more than vapid, blow-dried spokesmodels trying to get famous, is enough to get too many of them to roll over and sing for their supper.

Wolf Blitzer and Howard Kurtz got ten minutes of television time with a guy who was involved in blowing the cover of a CIA operative tasked to keep weapons of mass destruction out of the hands of terrorists, and the best they could do was to let him talk about how sad he is that all these bad people are after him. That pretty much says it all. The combination of careerism, an absence of journalistic standards, and the notorious allergy the mainstream media has when it comes to self-critique, has proven to be a poisonous cocktail.

Some of my co-workers and friends have said they think I should try to get one of those day-passes to the briefing room, to see if it is as easy as it sounds. Once upon a time, the very idea of walking into the White House Press Briefing Room and raising my hand with the rest of the crush would have kept me awake nights in giddy anticipation. To walk in the footsteps of giants, at least in my profession, would have felt akin to striding to the high-rollers table in the best casino in Vegas with a fat wad of bills and an eye for the opening.

After “Gannon”, after Williams, after Gallagher, after McManus, after Wolf and Howie, after seeing what corporate conglomerate ownership of journalism has done to a once-honorable calling, after watching this administration ruthlessly exploit the glaring cracks in what we call reporting today, I don’t feel that way anymore. Today, walking into the White House Press Briefing Room would make me feel like a cheapjack slot jockey sneaking into a crummy casino on the dusty end of the strip, hoping to hustle a few chips from a dealer who knows the table is already fixed.

I know there are still reputable journalists, men and women of integrity, working that room. Those are the people who need to raise the hue and cry on this matter, before it is too late. What is happening in American journalism, and in that most important of rooms, is a lessening of us all, and it is very, very dangerous.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

A Televisual Fairyland
By George Monbiot
The Guardian U.K.

The US media is disciplined by corporate America into promoting the Republican cause

On Thursday, the fairy king of fairyland will be recrowned. He was elected on a platform suspended in midair by the power of imagination. He is the leader of a band of men who walk through ghostly realms unvisited by reality. And he remains the most powerful person on earth.

How did this happen? How did a fantasy president from a world of make believe come to govern a country whose power was built on hard-headed materialism? To find out, take a look at two squalid little stories which have been concluded over the past 10 days.

The first involves the broadcaster CBS. In September, its 60 Minutes programme ran an investigation into how George Bush avoided the Vietnam draft. It produced memos which appeared to show that his squadron commander in the Texas National Guard had been persuaded to “sugarcoat” his service record. The programme’s allegations were immediately and convincingly refuted: Republicans were able to point to evidence suggesting the memos had been faked. Last week, following an inquiry into the programme, the producer was sacked, and three CBS executives were forced to resign.

The incident couldn’t have been more helpful to Bush. Though there is no question that he managed to avoid serving in Vietnam, the collapse of CBS’s story suggested that all the allegations made about his war record were false, and the issue dropped out of the news. CBS was furiously denounced by the rightwing pundits, with the result that between then and the election, hardly any broadcaster dared to criticise George Bush. Mary Mapes, the producer whom CBS fired, was the network’s most effective investigative journalist: she was the person who helped bring the Abu Ghraib photos to public attention. If the memos were faked, the forger was either a moron or a very smart operator.

Read the rest of The Guardian piece…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1392797,00.html

PBS Adds Insult To Injury
By Eric Alterman
The Nation

August 30, 2004 Issue

The far right’s decades-long campaign to falsely brand PBS a leftist conspiracy–one that apparently included giving shows to such commies as William F. Buckley, Louis Rukeyser, Ben Wattenberg and Fortune magazine–has really hit pay dirt this year, first in creating a show around CNN’s conservative talking head Tucker Carlson, and now, far more egregiously, in creating a program for the extremist editorial board of the Wall Street Journal.
Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson is a nice guy and among the least offensive of contemporary conservative pundits. Unfortunately, that is damn faint praise indeed. In recent weeks, the purposely inflammatory demagogy of PBS’s newest host has included a description of John Edwards as “specializing in Jacuzzi cases,” owing to the lawyer’s successful representation of a small child who saw her intestines sucked out inside a wading pool. Carlson has compared the Democratic Party’s efforts to keep track of its own racial data to those of Gestapo head and SS chief Heinrich Himmler, and he accused John Kerry of demanding that “dark skinned foreigners from the Middle East fight our war for us.” No less odiously, he defended GOP smear tactics against the legless Democratic Vietnam veteran Max Cleland, who was linked with Osama bin Laden in one of the most scurrilous campaigns of the past century.

Still, the insult of throwing up Carlson to quiet the whining of crybaby conservatives pales in comparison to the injury of offering up millions of dollars in taxpayer and viewer-donated resources of our public broadcasting service to the far-right ideologues behind the Journal Editorial Report. Short of turning the broadcast day over to Rush Limbaugh or Richard Mellon Scaife, it’s difficult to imagine a more calculated effort to undermine PBS’s intended mission of providing alternative programming than this subsidy to a wealthy, conservative corporation to produce yet another right-wing cable chat show.

But ideology is only the half of it. I lack the space here to do justice to the many instances in which the Journal editors–who are responsible for producing what is, according to Alex Jones, head of the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, “perhaps the most influential, most articulate, most ferocious opinion page in the country”–have trampled on the rules of basic journalistic fairness. In What Liberal Media? I describe numerous examples of the editors’ deliberately misleading their readers–even in some cases ignoring or contradicting the first-rate reporting of the paper’s news pages. The quality of the editorial page’s sourcing is of no apparent concern when an enemy is declared. Lyndon LaRouche’s minions were used as backup to spread false rumors about Michael Dukakis’s mental health. Known liars and thieves provided the grist for an endlessly spun web of fictional intrigue involving Bill Clinton’s alleged murder plots and drug-running in Arkansas.

In a lengthy examination in the Columbia Journalism Review, Trudy Lieberman found six dozen examples of disputed Journal editorials and op-eds. She discovered that “on subjects ranging from lawyers, judges, and product liability suits to campus and social issues, a strong America, and of course, economics, we found a consistent pattern of incorrect facts, ignored or incomplete facts, missing facts, uncorroborated facts.” In many of these cases, the editors refused to print a correction, preferring to allow the aggrieved party to write a letter to the editor, which would be printed much later, and then let the reader decide whose version appeared more credible. Almost never does the paper correct the record or admit its errors.

Recently Peggy Noonan, who writes for the page, decided to return to her original job as a flack for the GOP. This is, in a way, unfortunate, as PBS viewers will be denied the entertainment value of her analysis, which has on occasion included anti-Communist magic dolphins sent by God to save Elián González and posthumously delivered sermons by the late Senator Paul Wellstone excoriating the mourners at his own funeral.

As I wrote in this space when CNBC ran its version of the same show–on a for-profit, conservative cable network, I might add–”To find the same combination of conviction, partisanship and ideological extremism on the far left, a network would need to convene a ’roundtable’ featuring Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Vanessa Redgrave and Fidel Castro.” But perhaps what is most offensive about PBS’s decision to fund and broadcast Carlson (who already has a show on CNN five evenings a week) and the Journal editors (whose preaching is subsidized and distributed by the Dow Jones Corporation, whose profit last year topped $1.5 billion) is that it is being portrayed by its sponsor, New York’s WETA, as “balance” for the program Now With Bill Moyers. In fact, these conservative opinion programs are in no way comparable to Moyers’s show. Though Moyers is unarguably a liberal, his show is not a program of ideological advocacy but of public journalistic investigation. Its primary function is to air reports of corporate and governmental abuses that appear nowhere else in the media, and to explore all sides of contentious issues. When Moyers does an interview, you are just as likely to get a Robert Bartley, a Grover Norquist or a Paul Gigot as anyone on the liberal side of the aisle. When Moyers retires at the end of the year (at which time PBS will reduce the show to a half-hour), his chosen replacement will be David Brancaccio, a reporter who comes from that hotbed of anticapitalist agitation, NPR’s Marketplace. (Disclosure: Moyers and I are friends, and his patronage has helped me with my books on the media and democracy.)

Given the right’s domination of television talk shows and its already strong representation on public broadcasting, the only imaginable explanation for the decision to put PBS resources in the hands of well-financed, well-distributed, unabashedly partisan and journalistically challenged ideologues can be naked political pressure. As we have seen over the past three decades, the relentless conservative campaign to “work the refs” works. If liberals are to retain their voice in the public discourse, they had better find a way to let the pooh-bahs of PBS know exactly what they think of decisions like this one, and what they plan to do about it.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An Exegesis
By David Neiwert

Read The Full Report…
http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismintroduction.php

Introduction

Is fascism an obsolete term? Even if it resurrects itself as a significant political threat, can we use the term with any effectiveness?

My friend John McKay, discussing the matter at his Weblog archy, wonders if the degraded state of the term has rendered it useless. After all, it has in many respects become a catchall for any kind of totalitarianism, rather than the special and certainly cause-specific phenomenon it was. Anyone using the word nowadays is most often merely participating in this degradation.

Nonetheless, I think Robert O. Paxton has it right in his essay “The Five Stages of Fascism”:

We cannot give up in the face of these difficulties. A real phenomenon exists. Indeed, fascism is the most original political novelty of the twentieth century, no less. … If we cannot examine fascism synthetically, we risk being unable to understand this century, or the next. We must have a word, and for lack of a better one, we must employ the word that Mussolini borrowed from the vocabulary of the Italian Left in 1919, before his movement had assumed its mature form. Obliged to use the term fascism, we ought to use it well.

The following essay is devoted to that idea. Its purpose is, if nothing else, to give the reader a clear understanding of fascism not merely as a historical force but a living one.

The essay originally appeared as a series of posts at my Weblog Orcinus, sparked by an erroneous report of something Rush Limbaugh reportedly had told his radio audience. The error was soon corrected, but the remarks had in any event stirred me to write about my concerns about the way the political climate in America is heading, based on material and information I’d been gathering on a variety of issues pertaining to the radical right and its increasing ideological traffic with mainstream conservatism.

Because Orcinus is generally intended as an actual journal — a place for me to work out writing ideas and to post original source material on news stories and events that interest me — much of what appeared on the blog was in many ways a rough draft. Moreover, since it is a public enterprise, I obtained much feedback during the course of writing it, some of which affected the content and nature of the essay and appears in the current text.

The version that appears before you is, of course, considerably edited and rewritten. There is a good deal of new material that did not appear anywhere on the blog. Whole sections have been rearranged and edited down, and the order of the argument is not exactly what appears on the blog. In this respect, it may be an instructive exercise for anyone interested in the writing process to compare the two; but in any event, this version is the definitive edition, since a number of errors and repetitions, as well as logical missteps, can be found in the rough draft, naturally.

While I establish early in the essay that this is an attempt at a “scholarly” discussion of fascism, I should however clarify that I am in fact merely a journalist, not a scholar, nor do I pretend to be one. The following essay is more in the way of a journalistic survey of the academic literature regarding fascism, and an attempt at a kind of lay analysis of the literature’s contents as it relates to the current political context. However, none of the ideas regarding the core of fascism, nor its many accompanying traits, are my own. “Rush” is mostly drawn from a body of scholarly work on fascism that’s broadly accepted as the important texts on the subject, and I’ll urge anyone interested in examining the matter seriously to read them. There’s a bibliography at the end.

The core of my interest in fascism is closely connected to my work in trying to understand the motivations of right-wing extremists, because my experience was that in most regards many of these folks were seemingly ordinary people. And I was furthermore intrigued by the historical phenomenon of the Holocaust, particularly the problem of how a nation full ordinary people could allow such a monstrosity to happen. I’m interested in fascism as a real-world phenomenon and not an abstract and distant concept.

As such, I’m hoping this essay if nothing else helps advance a wider understanding of fascism in the general public, because I’ve come to understand that this awareness is essential if we are to combat it.

———————–

*David Neiwert is a freelance journalist based in Seattle. His reportage for MSNBC.com on domestic terrorism won the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000. He is the author of In God’s Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest (1999, WSU Press), as well as the forthcoming Death on the Fourth of July: Hate Crimes and the American Landscape (Palgrave/St. Martin’s Press, 2004) and Strawberry Days: The Rise and Fall of the Bellevue Japanese-American Community (publisher pending, 2004). His freelance work can be found at Salon.com, the Washington Post, MSNBC and various other publications. He can be contacted at Orcinus.

Read The Full Report Here…
http://www.cursor.org/stories/fascismintroduction.php