Keith Olbermann hits on the strange Jimmy/Jeff White House visits:
Courtesy of DEMbloggers. Check them out.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
For those of us (or just least lil ol’ me) who can’t get the video to come up…can you add some commentary? What is it that we are to see on this very important video clip?
a new comment instead of a reply. It must be almost bedtime.
Windows Media Player.
It’s comical. It has Dana Milbank of the WP and Keith Olberman cracking jokes and explaining how a reporter enters and leaves the WH. They recommend Guckert for the medal of honor for sitting thru so many briefings.
Thanks.
Hmmm, I thought I had Windows Media Player or whatever it is. It just came up looking like chicken scratches. Time to get Lou, the computer guy in to check on things.
mocking one of their anchors (Carol Whatshername) for allowing ‘bullshit’ from a person being interviewed. “It’s your bleep-ing job” he shouted.
Although I don’t know if you would call Comedy Central MSM.
I am swimming against the bloggers tide on this one.
I find that I remain depressed by the Internet reaction to this whole Gannon/Guckert event.
It is entirely common practice for all political parties and for corporates either to have supporters dedicated to getting their messages into the mainstream media by whatever means they can or (particularly corporates)to pay professional agencies to do this for them.
The Republican party is particularly fortunate in having a whole web, well documented over the last seven years (please see Eurolegal), of “policy research units” dedicated to this task. They are well funded by neocons and rich Republicans with a sense of mission and zeal. They operate outside the main structure of the party but have considerable influence upon it and within it. The White House administration are undoubtedly grateful for the existence of such dedicated supporters willing to carry their message to the media. So would any party in government. These privately funded agencies do their job well and other political parties in the United States and elsewhere recognise their importance in effective campaigning and promotion of ideals.
The hack work of translating policies and supportive pieces for planting in the press is one that few professional journalists would want. Nor is such professional experience required. As a result, these agencies are happy to employ, on a low remuneration basis, those who can write adequately and can regurgitate the White House statements and policy briefings as news.
PR agencies in the mainstream of political and corporate life employ such non-journalistically qualified people continuously and have done so for many years. For larger more prestigious activities, such as a special supplement promoting say, the tourist and investment opportunities of a small country as an insert supplement into, say, the Financial Times, the PR agencies will employ on a free lance basis highly qualified and experienced journalists to act as editors and overall writers for such work. These freelancing editors may well incorporate work into such publications from those with a PR rather journalistic background. It is promotion not objectivity that is the legitimate objective.
There is nothing about the event in what I have written, so far, which is particularly exceptional or new.
If I now turn to to the Gannon/Guckert affair in particular, then there exists no evidence, I repeat no evidence, of anything outside the mainstream of current accepted practice other than two factors that have combined to make it a useful but very minor political issue for the Democrats.
It is simply the story of one of these Republican supporting groups of individuals, who have fingers in many pies, setting up one of these PR agencies as a quasi “press agency” and employing one of the usual unqualified writers to do their hack work for them. They were still advertising for such people for jobs in different parts of the country after the Gannon affair broke.
As it happens Gannon, who had failed to make any real impression in any creditable role since graduating and appears to be a man courting failure in life, did his job with incredible zeal. He obviously enjoyed the halo effect that comes from proximity to power through the access to the White House that his work for a Republican supporting agency gave him and he did his job with zeal. Too much zeal. Finding that there was an open door to anyone who wants to promote this administration, he was never out of the place – an understandable reaction from a man of little personal weight and consequence.
Unfortunately for him, his sycophantic questioning at a press briefing brought him to the attention of bloggers. One of these immediately found that this hurriedly employed minor employee of a political promotion agency had an unacceptable Internet sideline, the exposure of which led to his severance from the agency that employed him, a denial of further White House access, and a questioning of White House intelligence by two Democratic Representatives.
This sort of thing happens many times at all sorts of levels in political and corporate life. It is always a minor embarrassment, but little more than that and has no great import.
That is the main, limited import of the Guckert/Gannon affair and where it is going. It is no small surprise that the MSNBC newscast quite properly puts this story into proper context, no matter how much bloggers would want to see it dealt with as being of deep significance. The disconnect between them and the mainstream media will result in more petulant comments an d rants about “lazy” journalism and bias in reporting.
It has some political mileage as a minor contribution in relating the apparently excessive use of such agencies by this Administration to intelligence failures on matters of much greater import and the bigger issue of the use of “real” journalists to act as paid employees of government departments to insert news items as being of genuine journalistic content. Reps Slaughter and Conyers are doing a good job of exploiting this minor affair as indicative of much bigger issues.
So why did I begin with saying that I am depressed by the Internet reaction to the Guckert/Gannon? Some readers of this comment may discern the direction in which my thoughts are going.
This is already an overly long comment. To fully explain this, I will complete it as a topic in New European Times. It will touch on some of the salaciousness that now drives this story on. More importantly, however, it will refer to some of the paucity of blogs as a mechanism for positive policy development and forward thinking politics. It will demonstrate the differences between those experienced in the mechanisms of power of most professional journalists and the majority of those contributing to blogs who are not so familiar with such realpolitik of public life.. It will point out the failure of blogs, which may be endemic in their nature and perhaps incapable of rectification, to grasp the true nature of journalism.
The real disappointment, however, lies not in the weakness of blogs that has been demonstrated by the excessive time and effort expended on the Gannon/Guckert affair, but in the disarray that it shows amongst the much vaunted grassroots of the Democrats on the Internet.
Welshman,
WTF are you trying to say??
Answer in one paragraph or less, please.
The girl with glasses in front isn’t half-bad, at least for a journalist.