Quote of the Week: “She's already thrown her broom into the ring.” -- Michael Barone, author of the “definitive” Almanac of American Politics, published by the “nonpartisan” National Journal Group, on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) presidential ambitions.

Week ending February 25, 2005
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Quote of the Week:

“She's already thrown her broom into the ring.”

-- Michael Barone, author of the “definitive” Almanac of American Politics, published by the “nonpartisan” National Journal Group, on Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-NY) presidential ambitions.

This Week:

Gannongate/fake news update

Who is paying for Rush Limbaugh's trip to Afghanistan to criticize progressives?

FOX fixed doctored Clinton quote; but still hasn't addressed Hume's distortion of FDR

Social Security misinformation continues

Gannongate/fake news update

Author and media critic Eric Alterman noted this week that, despite its obvious newsworthiness, the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert story has been essentially ignored by several major media organizations:

All sorts of interesting, and damning, nuggets continue to tumble out of the Gannongate story. Yet according to LexisNexis, neither ABC, CBS, Los Angeles Times, nor Miami Herald (just to name a few) have reported on the $200-an-hour male escort who, with no journalism experience and using an alias while working for a phony news organization, was allowed into White House press briefings without having to submit to a full background security check. Move along folks, nothing of interest here.

Since then, the Los Angeles Times ran an article downplaying the oddity of Gannon's presence in White House press briefings; the Times equated Gannon with two other well-known figures:

The White House press corps has since attracted an array of unusual personalities. ... Lester Kinsolving, conservative radio commentator, wore a clerical collar to White House briefings in the Reagan years. His loud voice and off-beat, argumentative questions often provoked laughter. President Clinton, to lighten up the proceedings, often called on Sarah McLendon, who worked for a string of small newspapers in Texas and called herself a citizen journalist unafraid to blast government bureaucrats.

But Kinsolving and McLendon have little in common with Gannon. Gannon has no journalism experience and attended press briefings as a representative of a partisan organization, GOPUSA.com. By contrast, Kinsolving is a radio host, has worked as a nationally-syndicated columnist, and was twice nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, by the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner. Kinsolving is a conservative, to be sure, and perhaps, as the Times noted, “off-beat” -- but that is where the similarities to Jeff Gannon seem to end.

Nor does Sarah McLendon belong in the same conversation as Jeff Gannon. To wit:

• McLendon attended the University of Missouri's Pulitzer School of Journalism; Gannon paid $50 to attend a two-day seminar at the conservative Leadership Institute.
• McLendon's journalism experience included a stint at the Washington bureau of the Philadelphia Daily News and running a news service that provided content for local papers in Texas. Gannon's “experience” included a stint at GOPUSA.com and serving as “Washington bureau chief” for a “news service” that acted as a front for ... GOPUSA.com.

Apparently, we can't say this often enough: the problem with Jeff Gannon isn't that he's conservative, that he wrote for an obscure online publication, or that he's “off-beat.” It's that he is not a reporter; he isn't a journalist by any stretch of the imagination. He's a political activist who represented a company called GOPUSA.com, which is run by a delegate to the Republican National Convention. To compare him to Sarah McLendon or Les Kinsolving is to miss the point -- badly.

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr. certainly hasn't missed that point; he wrote:

[I]t's ... deplorable that he [Gannon] was ever seated in the White House briefing room. As to how that happened, Bush spokesman Scott McClellan has pleaded ignorance, saying that, “In this day and age, when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide, to try to pick and choose who is a journalist.”

Which is patently ridiculous. Contrary to the press secretary's Hamletlike agonizing, it's not all that hard to know who is and is not a reporter. If an individual reports for a recognized media outlet that observes customary standards of journalistic integrity - even if it tends to view the world through a conservative or liberal editorial prism - that person is a reporter.

But if the person works for an outlet that simply promotes, or advocates for, one political party or another, then the line between reporter and shill has been well and truly crossed.

It's not brain surgery. So you'll have to forgive me for not extending the benefit of doubt to McClellan. My problem is that he speaks for an administration with a long record of manipulating truth and propagandizing the public.

[...]

Frankly, the only thing more galling than the brazenness with which the White House abrogates the public's right to know is the sheeplike docility with which we accept it, with which we become complicit in our own hoodwinking.

When the history of this era is written, people will wonder why we didn't challenge its excesses, why we didn't know the things we should have. If you're still around, remember the uproar you do not hear right this moment and tell them the truth.

Ignorance was easier.

Senators Harry Reid (D-NV), Richard Durbin (D-IL), John Kerry (D-MA), Edward Kennedy (D-MA), and Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) have written a letter to President Bush putting the Gannon matter in context and demanding an investigation:

Another reason the Gannon/Guckert affair is disturbing is because of what we have recently learned about apparent efforts by some in your Administration to try to “buy” favorable news coverage. These other efforts include paying news personalities Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher large sums of money to promote your Administration's education and marriage initiatives, and using tax payer dollars to produce video news releases promoting the new prescription drug benefit for Medicare beneficiaries and other policies the Administration regards as accomplishments. A recent report by the General Accountability Office called such video news releases illegal uses of public funds. More recently, we have heard troubling reports that Social Security Administration officials may be using public funds and pressuring public employees to promote your goal of privatizing Social Security.

As you know, concerns that government officials may be trying to deceive the public by manipulating the media can be extremely corrosive to public trust. For that reason, we respectfully request that you order an immediate and thorough investigation into the Gannon/Guckert matter. How is it possible that a man using a fake name, with dubious journalism credentials, was able to clear the White House's extensive security screening process and gain such close access to you and your staff for such an extended period of time? Have there been other, similar breaches of security and journalism standards?

Reporters eager to shed what Pitts called their “sheeplike docility” and begin trying to find answers to some of the questions raised by Senators Reid, Durbin, et al., might start by examining Karl Rove's relationship with Talon News/GOPUSA.

Salon.com's Eric Boehlert reported this week that Talon/GOPUSA head Bobby Eberle “thanked Karl Rove for his 'assistance, guidance, and friendship'” in a “personal posting on GOPUSA” last year.

Eberle was a delegate to the 2000 Republican National Convention that nominated George W. Bush for president, was a delegate to the 1996, 1998 and 2000 Republican Party of Texas state conventions (then-Governor George W. Bush ran for reelection in 1998), and was “recognized with a unanimously approved resolution of commendation by the Republican Party of Texas for service and dedication to the Republican cause” in 1999, according to the biography of Eberle that used to be posted at GOPUSA.com.

What precisely is the relationship between Rove, who owes his position in the White House to his work in Texas Republican politics in the 1990s, and Texas Republican activist Bobby Eberle, who thanked Rove for his “assistance, guidance and friendship”? Does their relationship explain how Gannon was able to attend White House press briefings?

Does it explain why Gannon sent FOX News host Sean Hannity an email in September 2004 boasting that, according to Hannity, “he's about to break a story in an exclusive about these CBS documents”? Representative Maurice Hinchey (D-NY) recently suggested that Rove and the Bush White House may have planted the apparently fake CBS documents in order to divert attention from Mr. Bush's spotty National Guard record. While Hinchey didn't offer direct evidence, he noted the Bush administration's history of manipulating the media. Rove has been the subject of similar speculation in the past: he is widely thought to have bugged his own office in 1996 in order to suggest that the campaign he was working against was responsible for the act; and Austin, Texas, reporters suspected that in 2000, Rove arranged the mailing of a Bush debate practice tape to Al Gore's campaign to disrupt the Gore debate preparation efforts.

Who is paying for Rush Limbaugh's trip to Afghanistan to criticize progressives?

Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh, a White House favorite, traveled to Afghanistan to promote Bush administration policies. Last week, we wondered who is paying for Limbaugh's trip, and whether he is being paid for his work for the administration. This week, while on his Afghanistan trip, Limbaugh has been criticizing the Democratic Party and progressives in general in his conversations with U.S. troops and in his radio broadcasts. Again, we wonder: who is paying for Limbaugh's trip? Why was no progressive sent as a counterpoint?

FOX fixed doctored Clinton quote; but still hasn't addressed Hume's distortion of FDR

Media Matters for America noted this week:

Since April 2002, FOX News has consistently doctored Associated Press articles featured on the FOX News website concerning terrorist attacks in the Middle East to conform to Bush administration terminology. Without any editorial notation disclosing that words in the AP articles have been changed, FOX News replaces the terms “suicide bomber” and “suicide bombing” with “homicide bomber” and “homicide bombing” to describe attackers who kill themselves and others with explosives. In at least one case, FOX News actually altered an AP quote from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) to fit this naming convention, and then revised it to restore the quote without noting either the original alteration or its correction.

But while FOX News fixed the Clinton quote, the network still hasn't addressed anchor Brit Hume's "outrageous distortion" of a statement by Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Social Security misinformation continues

As the debate over privatization of Social Security continues, the media continues to offer misleading and inaccurate reports on the topic:

A National Public Radio (NPR) report cited an estimate of Social Security's long-term revenue shortfall over an “infinite horizon,” even though the American Academy of Actuaries has called this figure “misleading” and said it “provide[s] little if any useful information about the program's long-range finances.”

FOX News' Jim Angle insisted that “the president has not proposed” benefit cuts, suggesting that Representative Steny Hoyer's (D-MD) warnings of the same were misleading. But, as Media Matters noted:

White House aides and congressional Republicans have said in anonymous statements that Bush will propose reducing benefits (see here and here). Moreover, “Model 2” from Bush's 2001 Commission to Strengthen Social Security, widely expected to form the basis of the reform plan Bush will propose (see here, here, here, and here), reduces benefits by indexing the growth of initial benefit levels to prices rather than wages, as is currently done. A leaked memo about Bush's plans for Social Security from Peter H. Wehner, head of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives, also endorsed this concept.

On the public radio program Marketplace, investment adviser Gabriel Wisdom told listeners that Social Security could begin paying out lower-than-expected benefits in just 15 years. But the Social Security board of trustees project that the trust fund will be able to pay all promised benefits for another 37 years, and the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office puts the projection at 47 years.

A Media Matters for America analysis of guests on cable and network news broadcasts “failed to find one independent expert with a graduate degree in economics who supported allowing workers to divert Social Security payroll taxes into private accounts”:

Media Matters found eight guests who held graduate degrees in economics; three supported privatizing Social Security, and five opposed it. While all five opponents of privatization are supported by independent universities and organizations, all three privatization proponents are funded by right-wing organizations and foundations.

But the right-wing-funded economists may be giving way to a new batch of privatization advocates: representatives of USA Next (which changed its name from United Seniors Association, possibly to obscure the organization's history of “preying on vulnerable old people with statements that distort the problems facing Social Security and Medicare”) have taken the lead in a slash-and-burn campaign to destroy Social Security -- and the AARP. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, United Seniors/USA Next “has ties to the Republican party. Its president and CEO, Charles Jarvis, once worked for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Other staff and board members worked as lobbyists for the Republican Party, are former GOP congressmen, or worked for conservative organizations such as Focus on the Family.” The group has numerous other ties to Republican causes, and it recently hired the consultants responsible for the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth to “orchestrate attacks” on the AARP, as Media Matters for America noted this week.

But none of that has stopped FOX News from hosting USA Next representatives -- and, as Media Matters explained:

[D]espite the fact that the group has spent millions of dollars to support Republican candidates and policies, was founded and is currently led by prominent Republicans, and is advised by Republican consultants, FOX News did not identify USA Next as Republican -- or even conservative -- in any appearance by Jarvis or [USA Next national chairman Art] Linkletter.

Jamison Foser is Executive Vice President at Media Matters for America.