"Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
— George Orwell, in "Politics and the English Language"
OK, so I'm a week late to the Gannon/Guckert party.
I tend to assume that everyone already reads Eschaton. But for those who don't: A) why on earth not? and B) here's a quick recap.
GOPUSA is a conservative, partisan Web site with ties to the Texas Republican Party (read their platform some time, it's quite interesting). Among their side projects is a virtual Texas GOP version of Pravda called "Talon News."
So Talon, which has no experience or credibility with actual journalism, hires a "reporter" with a corresponding lack of both who goes by the name of "Jeff Gannon." Gannon becomes a regular user of a daily visitor's pass to White House press briefings and becomes White House spokesman Scott McClellan's go-to guy for softball questions.
"Questions" is probably too strong a word. Gannon's usual shtick was just to recite the latest party talking points, followed something like "Wouldn't you agree?" It was interesting that Gannon and McClellan seemed always to be on the same page — as though they were reading from the same set of memos. And it was even more interesting when Gannon, who never did any actual reporting aside from showing up at briefings, seemed to have access to information that the rest of the press corps did not have. Most interesting of all: some of that information had to do with the Valerie Plame investigation, in which two unnamed senior White House officials are accused of exposing America's covert anti-terror operations.
Gannon's brief career as a "journalist" ended this week at the hands of a diligent brigade of bloggers who, using little more than Google and the public paper trails of the Internet, provided a bit more background on "Jeff Gannon." His real name, it seems, is James D. Guckert, and while he has no training or previous experience as a reporter, his resume does include an apparent history — perhaps ongoing — of employment as a male escort. (Here you are invited to insert your own joke about the media whores of the White House press corps.)
Here's a capable summary from the Wilmington, Del., paper. For more comprehensive background, check out Americablog, which has been all over this story all week.
Two comments:
1. The sex angle is a side-show.
Yes, the beef-cake underwear photos posted on Guckert's "miltaryescortsm4m" site are giggle-worthy. And, yes, it's further evidence that the supply of closet-homosexual/public-homophobe Republicans seems to be inexhaustible. I get why this angle is getting played up. And it is only fair that the Bush Administration, which has gotten so much political mileage out of anti-gay initiatives should be made to squirm over this.
But the implication here is not that Guckert was merely involved in gay sex — which is, or ought to be, perfectly legal and nobody's business — but in prostitution, which is a criminal offense. I don't really care about the particular tastes of Guckert and his customers. I do care that they seem to have been paying customers, and that an alleged prostitute was granted more access to White House sources than were the experienced journalists of some of the most prestigious media outlets in the country.
Yet even Guckert's alleged criminal past (present?) isn't the point. The issue here is that the president's own political party created a sham reporter so that the president's spokesperson could avoid the questions of the press and the public, undermining the people's right to know with another layer of sham, PR, spin and deception. It's pure Orwell. And it's a tactic that would never be imagined or employed by a party or a president who genuinely had the interests of the public or the country in mind, or who felt they had nothing to hide.
The Bush administration cannot simultaneously claim to be "promoting democracy" abroad while so vigorously undermining here in America.
2. Why don't more reporters know how to Google?
There's a word for what the bloggers who tracked down Guckert's real identity and activities were doing. That word is "journalism." They had enough curiosity and determination to follow a lead, and every tool they used to do that was readily available to all of the mainstream journalists who got scooped on this story.
There's no reason that reporters for the big newspapers, or the wire services, or the cable news channels couldn't have done exactly what the bloggers did in this case. For all the complaints about "media bias," this is another example of the much-larger problems of American journalism: laziness and incuriosity.
James Wolcott makes both of these points today:
It was inane watching Wolf Blitzer and Howie Kurtz take out their snuff boxes yesterday to pooh-pooh tsk-tsk the prurient zeal of lefty bloggers in pursuing this case, as if "Man Nips" Gannon/Guckert were just some vocal conservative with iffy credentials whose personal life had been pried open like a bad clam. That this imposter was able to attend White House briefings under an alias and lob softballs to the president while other reporters got blanked is worthy of investigation, yes? Particularly since it fits into the Bush administration's entire M.O. of staged events, vetted audiences and propaganda packaged as news. … Gannon/Guckert … was leading a double life and until we know the purpose of his duplicitous role (how the hell did he obtain the classified memo regarding Valerie Plame?), this story should be kept rudely alive.
Wolcott also links to this must-read bit of forgotten history from Rigorous Intuition. The nexus of a Republican White House, the CIA and gay prostitution is nothing new. J.D. Guckert, meet Craig Spence. Same family values, different day.
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