By RegoPark
Contributing Weblogger
June’s Vanity Fair does a postmortem on the so-called “fake” Talon News reporter who haplessly posted naked pics of himself on male-to-male escort websites before deciding to build the “Jeff Gannon, journalist” brand. A hodgepodge of overlapping issues unleashed themselves: concealed identities, misrepresentation, political hypocrisy, and Who’s That Guy and What’s He Doing in the White House Press Room? A “far-right” website, questionable journalistic credentials, and an outing fueled the fire to what many pundits could love to call Drudge Part Two. Except for one thing: independent alt journalism has been around a few years since the Lewinsky and Blumenthal dramas. The media doesn’t just dump on Matt Drudge anymore. They have the entire blogosphere to scatter-shoot. (Neither Drudge nor Gannon are bloggers, but somehow they all continue to get lumped and dumped together.) In any case, for many people, Gannongate brings out the worst in independent Internet journalism.
The Gannon legacy — and the continuing Drudge legacy — involves more than the legitimacy of Internet journalism. It’s really about two types of gatekeeping: brick-and-mortar and click-and-mortar. It raises questions: Who should be allowed past the physical White House gates into official governmental press conferences? Who or what is a “real” journalist? Does the Internet need outside regulation?
Since I’ll undoubtedly cover the separate issue of Internet regulation many times in the future, I want to focus today’s entry into the one that involves both Gannon and Drudge — the physical presence of independent reporters in the White House or other official government press rooms. Does it violate the First Amendment to bar people who are performing journalistic functions, even though they are one-person operations or without official industry credentials? Is there another way to address potential problems while granting them entry?
If Gannon hadn’t been busy building his “brand” with attention-getting questions — some might argue he was the teacher’s pet suck-up in the classroom of the Bush Administration White House Press Corps — it wouldn’t have motivated bloggers to unearth dirt on him. Gaining press credentials under his name and using another as his byline is perfectly legal. While he might have needed to get a “DBA Jeff Gannon” distinction in his business transactions, there’s no real evidence of impropriety, let alone illegal activity. But the appearance thereof — not to mention James/Jeff’s past “extracurricular” activities — raises questions. Somewhere between “What kind of riffraff’s been allowed into the clubhouse, anyway?” and “Has security been compromised?”
The scandal really isn’t about Gannon, but about White House proeedure. Anyone who gets into the White House for a daily press briefing — even for a day pass, as Gannon did — submits a Social Security number for a background screening. According to Vanity Fair’s sources, a reporter must represent a for-profit news medium, whether its revenue is generated by subscription or advertising. Said journalist must generate most of his or her income from that organization. This keeps lobbyists on the right side of the gate.
To be sure, there are benefits to physical gatekeeping in official press rooms. We could do without a room full of Jeff Gannons asking rambling, disruptive, interest-group-centered, or inflammatory pseudoquestions when the Presidential staff is trying to run a conference. They’re not running a journalism school over there on Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s not their job to brief anyone on press brief protocol.
I sat through a few C-SPAN tapings in pre-Internet days where a wildly dressed older woman from an obscure news outlet was annoyingly emotional and abrasive at a conference on the raid on the Branch Davidian compound. All her “questions” seemed to do was add to the pressure cooker. What if there were more of her? On the other hand, I really don’t give a crap who finds whom irritating amongst the press gang. Pay no attention to the smarmy bald guy, children. You have work to do.
College journalism departments and J-schools, if nothing else, teach budding Rathers and Blitzers how not to waste time and make asses of themselves at these shindigs. How the symbiotic relationship between journalists and press agents/ PR people works. The networks and major publications weed out the screwballs before they get past Human Resources, let alone Washington. Exhubeant, irreverent Gannons could really run amok and drag things down if they all had easy access to important governmental press briefings. In more ways than one, the public would lose out if too many less-than-professional reporters had too much freedom in the brick-and-mortar press world.
At least once, Matt Drudge had White House Press Room clearance via Mark Halperin of ABC News (for whom he was expected to file a report.) If his Drudge Manifesto account accurately represents his experience, he’s another good reason why you don’t want just anyone bouncing around in the china shop.
Unlike Gannon, Drudge’s question to then-Press Secretary Mike McCurry was pretty innocuous. However many porcupine quills he might have shed on the carpet or pricked the famous journalists in the hallways, Matt wasn’t a disruptive participant. He did notice one press member who spent the entire time grooming herself (Q-tips, makeup, nail polish and all). Is that fair, he wrote in Drudge Manifesto, to American citizens who have questions for the White House but no access past the gates?
It disappointed me, therefore, that Drudge reports he excused himself from the room (because he burst out laughing at the reporter giving herself a pedicure) and walked around to play with a press computer terminals designated for a specific reporter. Here’s where we get into that pesky security issue. Someone who has any trouble with the concept of respecting others’ property doesn’t need a carte blanche under the roof that covers the Oval Office, Condi’s desk and Jenna’s guest bed. Any Googling will reveal that Drudge got his start snooping at CBS studios and retrieving confidential box office stats from garbage cans. If I ever get a job keeping the gates at our nation’s capital, Matt — love ya, mean it, but you ain’t gettin’ no press pass from me.
Is access to an official press briefing a right or a privilege? I need to consider this further, but I definitely think either one can and should be revoked. But let me say unequivocally that it should be initially granted. Not all “citizen reporters” are going to know how to act or ask questions. It’s fair to set and enforce guidelines. Violators can be ejected. And rejected for a second entry. As noxious as I may find Gannon/Guckert, it is no reason for me to get caught up in the politically motivated hysteria over whether he should have been admitted for so many day passes. There are so many clouding issues in the Gannongate story that I’m not sure which are real and which are as fake as everyone says Talon News was.
The background check is good enough for me re: the initial issue of entry. If there’s really a security concern with all these unknown reporters roaming the press quarters of the presidential palace, maybe it’s time to house the conferences somewhere else. However messy the ramifications, I think bloggers and obscure journalists belong in the briefing room, wherever that may be. Whether right or a privilege, I think freedom of the press really does belong to anyone who owns one (in Matt’s words). In my words, that includes communicating with public servants’ press contacts at the same time and place as mainstream journalists. This isn’t Hollywood. A reporter can’t claim a “right” to a Tom Cruise junket or a private conference where Britney’s publicist announces whether she’s knocked up this week. A White House press conference is a line of communication between the government and the people, a live liaison between live liasons: Uncle Sam / his press secretary / members of the press / you and me. Press agents represent the Oval Office, so who are the people’s reps? Do we get to decide?
The problem with restricting official press conference access is that the mainstream media is burdened with too many filters to be an effective liaison between Us and Them. Most of us working types have better things to do than watch raw C-SPAN footage during daylight hours. We outsource other people to stand in that room for us. We hope we’ll get a good faith effort of objective news reporting, not politically slanted one way or another. We hope they’ll ask intelligent questions that can’t easily be spun, but won’t get the prez or the press sec into a tailspin of sophisticated generalities or semantic judo. Questions that relate to what we want to know, what we’re naturally curious about or which reveal insights about an issue that may not occur to us to ask.
And when the conference dialogue is completed, we hope that the report that’s filed to the various news outlets is accurate, thorough, and in the correct context — whether or not it makes good copy to generate newsstand sales or TV ratings or keep Rupert Murdoch or Les Moonves happy. We hope that these “reps” allowed past Uncle Sam’s velvet rope have nothing to lose by coming through for us. Who aren’t preoccupied by their own navel gazing (or in Matt’s anecdote of that reporter, self-grooming during work time) to focus on what’s important. Who aren’t busy being celebrities in their own right, thinking they are above the fray, lightheartedly bragging on-camera about sneaking a camcorder into the Trump wedding against the explicit instructions of the bride and groom. Not to mention more serious journalistic scruples. And some of us hope they won’t dis the riffraff who are denied entry by Dubya’s bouncers. And some of us like to think it’s possible that the A-list can see indie journalists as simply a different paradigm. A different set of pros and cons. A different corps of boons and limitations. Colleagues, in some permutations. Members of an industry to accept, not undermine or ostracize.
Well, dream on.
That is why it irks me to see outsiders who do get past the gates abuse the opportunity. It tears down the esteem and respect of “citizen journalists” who could put it to good use. If DrudgeBlog got into an important government press briefing, I wouldn’t do anything to make the Powers That Be rethink their decision to admit bloggers. My problem with Gannon is not his frequent White House day passes under false pretenses, because I’m not sure that’s the case. He provided his Social Security number. He wrote lots of stories for anyone who chose to patronize Talon News. His politics, journalistic skill and personal life matter not so much to me as the fact that he was not adapting appropriately to the press environment. Matt, for his part, created a potential appearance of impropriety — wasting minutes of conference time outside the press room, fooling around with a computer that wasn’t his. In short, they both acted like journalistic kindergarteners. Nothing more, nothing less.
If “citizen journalists” act like kindergarteners, they’re going to be treated like kindergarteners — seen and not heard, talked down to, shut out of the grownups’ room, not trusted to handle themselves around the big kids. And like my kindergarten teacher would say, “you boys are going to stay outside until you can be good citizens!”
by RegoPark - 12:59 pm
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