I felt all special and tingly when a comment from Jeff Gannon himself appeared appended to my previous post; but the hard lessons of many decades have taught me, as Groucho said: always inspect the dice. If you read to the end of this post -- generally quite informative about the Bush era of managed news -- you will discover that Gannon kind of robo-posts about himself, apparently with the aim of promoting a book. Not so tingly.
At the risk of getting more and more comments from him, I will re-issue my claim that Gannon is a fine example of the modern era of news management and planted questions. I don't think there's much doubt that he got a special deal to put him in the White House briefing room despite a total lack of journalistic cred. It is simply not true, either, that anyone could get those day passes without a substantial amount of grease.
Mr. Graff said he was inspired to try to seek access to the White House by the controversy over James D. Guckert, who used the alias Jeff Gannon. Mr. Guckert was granted daily passes to White House briefings while writing for a Web site run by a Republican operative in Texas. The episode raised questions about who was a legitimate journalist and how access to the White House was granted.
And what did the White House press office get from Gannon in return? "Questions" like this famous one.
Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?
And this one, which is not so famous but even more hilariously not a question, in the sense of, you know, trying to elicit an answer:
Gannon to Scott McClellan:
Thank you. First of all, I hope the grand jury didn't force you to turn over the wedding card I sent to you and your wife. (Laughter.) Do you see any hypocrisy in the controversy about the President's mention of 9/11 in his ads, when Democratic icon Franklin Delano Roosevelt's campaign issued this button, that says, 'Remember Pearl Harbor'? I have a visual aid for folks watching at home.
I don't mean to romp over old history. But I do think the current round of outrage at CNN seems a little misplaced, here in the era of heavily gamed news media.
I think the problem with last Wednesday debate was pretty much the opposite of what has been suggested. I thought the purpose of this debate gimmick was to unloose a kind of Whitmanesque sauciness and a sense of the truly motley American clamor that one finds on, well, YouTube. My sense is that, in discarding 5,000 or so questions, CNN quickly dispensed with anything esoteric, raucous, rude or oddball. What remained was predictable to a fault.
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