behind the news

Being and Nothingness: The Los Angeles Times asks, “What Is a Journalist?”

February 25, 2005

The Los Angeles Times ran a curious piece today which attempts to brush off the Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert mess as little more than another wacky episode in a lovable White House briefing room full of rakes, flakes and raconteurs.

The piece, titled “An Identity Crisis Unfolds in a Not-So-Elite Press Corps” does nearly everything wrong: it makes grand assumptions (exactly which reporter is having an identity crisis?) while relying on a series of half-truths and misleading statements to reach a muddled conclusion — one which we here at CJR Daily are still trying to parse.

The reporter, Johanna Neuman, begins by asking, “What is a journalist?” If Gannon was in the briefing room, she seems to reason, isn’t he a journalist? According to the Standing Committee of Journalists, the body charged with deciding who gets credentials to cover Capitol Hill, the answer is unequivocally “no.” It turns out that the professional group has pretty strict guidelines answering Neuman’s question — guidelines that Guckert failed to meet in December 2003, relegating him to a series of dubious day passes.

After relating a few bon mots about famous cranks in the White House press corps in an attempt to soften our image of them as serious journalists, Neuman delves into a brief history of Talon News. She rightly reports the organization’s ties to GOPUSA, an “avowedly partisan website” that “was the creation of a conservative Texas political activist named Bobby Eberle.” Eberle, as we know, is not only conservative, but served as a Republican delegate at the 2000 Republican National Convention.

As an arm of an openly conservative group with a Republican activist at its helm, it would seem to follow that Talon is an advocacy Web site, not a journalistic one, and its “reporting” should be read as such. Nevertheless, Neuman breezily informs us that a “furor” arose “over how a seeming Republican agent got clearance to attend White House briefings.” The equivocation here is odd, as there is nothing “seeming” about either Gannon’s or Talon’s political colors.

Once exposed, Talon News pulled Gannon’s bio and article archive, while quickly folding up shop — something Neuman fails to note.

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Having left pertinent information out and muddied the details of the story thus far, Neuman goes in for the kill, quoting Marlin Fitzwater, the creator of the press pass under the Reagan administration, saying “If you look at the question Gannon asked, it obviously reflected his conservative views … But it’s no different from the ones Helen Thomas [formerly of United Press International, now of Hearst] asked of Reagan, or Dan Rather [of CBS] asked in his more famous comments about Richard Nixon.”

This is where the story goes beyond the pale. If Fitzwater or Neuman honestly believes that there is any comparison to be made between Helen Thomas and a fake journalist with a fake name working for a fake news outlet asking fake questions at a real press briefing, then Neuman’s feigned befuddlement over what a journalist is begins to seem less feigned. Alas, if the Los Angeles Times sees fit to print lazy and misleading pieces such as this, then the craft may indeed be facing an identity crisis, the likes of which Jean-Paul Sartre described 50 years ago.

For a better sense of the import of Gannongate, turn to Jay Rosen, who, unlike Neuman, is a serious student of the press. Rosen writes on his blog Pressthink that “Creating ‘Jeff Gannon’ as a credible White House correspondent [while] creating radical doubt about the intentions of mainstream journalists in order to de-certify the traditional press, are two parts of the same effort, which stretches beyond the Bush team itself to allies in Republican Party politics, and to new actors like Sinclair Broadcasting, FreeRepublic.com, and Hugh Hewitt …”

And then, unlike the hapless Neuman, he draws from a network of sources and links to make an airtight case.

–Paul McLeary

Brian Montopoli is a writer at CJR Daily.