The Bush administration has been at war with the media from Day One. Is its real goal to undermine the press itself -- and thereby eliminate inconvenient truths?
By Eric Boehlert
For the last four years the persistent story line about the White House's relationship with the press has focused on the administration's discipline, denial of access, and ability to stay on message. The Bush administration, according to this account, is expert at managing information, using secrecy, carrots and sticks, and carefully crafted talking points to control the news.
But in the wake of revelations about the aggressive and unprecedented tactics employed by the White House to manipulate the news, that relatively benign interpretation is being reexamined. Recent headlines about paid-off pundits, video press releases disguised as news telecasts, and the remarkable press access granted to a right-wing psuedo-journalist working under a phony name, have led some to conclude that the White House is not simply aggressively managing the news, but is out to sabotage the press corps from within, to undermine the integrity and reputation of journalism itself.
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The choice has been a conscious one, according to Suskind. "When I was at the White House in 2002, I had a variety of discussions with them about their newfangled message control machine, and their prized discipline. They made a clear decision: We will ignore as best we can the mainstream press and let's see if there's any penalty for doing that," he says. He notes that the position of Karen Hughes, Bush's former chief communications advisor, was, "'We're not concerned; we don't see there being any penalty from the voters for ignoring the mainstream press.' And there's been none to date. "
There's certainly been no penalty imposed by the press corps itself. While the revelations about Guckert, a former male escort who spent his days cutting and pasting White House press releases and posting them as "news" stories, may have been embarrassing to the White House, officials were not castigated by the D.C. press, which generally turned away from the unpleasant story. ABC and CBS never even bothered to mention the three-week-running scandal. After three weeks of ignoring the story, both the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal on Friday finally introduced readers to Gannongate, coming to the benign conclusion that there have always been eccentric reporters inside the White House briefing room, and that Gannon was simply part of that tradition. (Those who think the Times and the Journal were justified in ignoring Gannongate for so long because it didn't qualify as news should note that for the week of Feb. 21, "Jeff Gannon" was among the "Top Ten Gaining Queries," according to Google's weekly tabulations.)
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2005/03/02/media/index.html
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