When the news is literally the party line
Edward Cone
News & Record
3-6-05
The Soviets called their party newspaper Pravda -- "Truth." Americans used to laugh at that kind of phony journalism. But more and more, the joke is on us.
Think it can't happen here? Click to the Web site of the Transylvania County Republican Party for a look at things to come. The official page for this western North Carolina political organization carries national news from an outfit called GOPUSA. The same news service feeds headlines and articles to at least a half-dozen other county GOP sites across North Carolina, and many more across the nation.
It's a tidy little news network, hewing close to the party line, self-contained and free from the impure thoughts so common to the mainstream press. A partner company to GOPUSA, called GOPweb, even designs and hosts many of the sites, including the one in Transylvania County. And until recently, this network had its very own White House correspondent. He reported with the zeal of a Pravda stringer, lobbing softball questions at press conferences and quoting administration press releases verbatim in his articles. He called himself Jeff Gannon.
"Gannon" has been in the (real) news a lot lately, but this time as the subject of coverage. It turns out that his name is Jim Guckert and that he is a minimally experienced journalist who obtained his press passes in clear violation of the spirit, if not the letter, of the policies covering White House access. Talon News, the dummy organization for which he worked, was an offshoot of GOPUSA, itself the creation of a Texas Republican activist named Bobby Eberle who boasted close ties to the Bush administration.
Guckert was also discovered to have worked as a male escort and to have posted nude photos of himself at a Web site promoting his services. It has been misreported that liberal bloggers somehow dug up those photos and outed Guckert, as if he wasn't already advertising his wares on the Internet. Questions about the Bush administration's background-check proficiency abound, as he claimed to have access to sensitive documents. Certainly we can add a new definition of the term "house organ," and it's fun to imagine the hyperventilation of the commentariat had someone working as an alleged gay prostitute been so welcomed by the Clinton White House.
But Guckert's avocation is the least-creepy aspect of this story. Talon News has been shut down and Eberle exposed, er, shown to be a propagandist. Yet the Guckert saga is not an isolated series of events. Instead, it is the latest example of a media strategy built not just on spinning a message, but on co-opting the mechanisms of message delivery.
It is a strategy that goes well beyond Guckert to include seemingly independent commentators such as Armstrong Williams, the former High Point businessman and semi-famous opinion journalist who was paid $240,000 to promote Bush's education policy. The Bush administration has also released tapes featuring faux-reporters touting its Medicare proposals, which have been shown during some local news broadcasts; this TV tactic was recently adopted by Gov. Schwarzenegger in California.
"Post press," the writer and New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen calls the Bush administration, identifying some new phenomenon beyond the antipathy for uncooperative journalists felt by every president. "Hating the press is normal behavior in the White House," says Rosen at his Web log, PressThink. "There's a difference between going around the press in an effort to avoid troublesome questions, and trying to unseat the idea that these people, professional journalists assigned to cover politics, have a legitimate role to play in our politics."
There is a certain can-do spirit to the Republican build-your-own media project that is very much of its era. Bloggers and other nontraditional reporters surely will follow Guckert to the White House. Corporations have inserted the word "infomercial" into our vocabularies, when "long ad" would work just fine. And news already has been repurposed and repackaged as comedy on "The Daily Show" and commentary on Fox News. I expect both political parties will continue down the Pravda path with increasing sophistication.
One big difference between the old Soviet Union and the land of the First Amendment is that the party-line press cannot exist here in a vacuum. Serious reporters, working for organizations or as independents, are able to expose scripted news and the agenda behind it. And with increased transparency into the news-making process a big promise of the new media, that process should only intensify. Over time, that ought to lessen the credibility of the scripters, but it won't stop them from trying to manipulate the news.
Eternal vigilance being the price of liberty, informed skepticism toward government-issue news is an ongoing obligation of Americans.
Edward Cone (www.edcone.com, efcone@mindspring.com) writes a column for the News & Record most Sundays.
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