The Media Filter

Eric Boehlert of Salon.com has a very interesting story about the coverage, or rather, lack thereof, of the Gannongate/Guckert story. It's worth sitting through a commercial for a day pass to read.

Ordinarily, revelations that a former male prostitute, using an alias (Jeff Gannon) and working for a phony news organization, was ushered into the White House -- without undergoing a full-blown security background check -- in order to pose softball questions to administration officials would qualify as news by any recent Beltway standard. Yet as of Thursday, ABC News, which produces "Good Morning America," "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings," "Nightline," "This Week," "20/20" and "Primetime Live," has not reported one word about the three-week-running scandal. Neither has CBS News ("The Early Show," "The CBS Evening News," "60 Minutes," "60 Minutes Wednesday" and "Face the Nation"). NBC and its entire family of morning, evening and weekend news programs have addressed the story only three times. Asked about the lack of coverage, a spokesperson for ABC did not return calls seeking comment, while a CBS spokeswoman said executives were unavailable to discuss the network's coverage. ...

Meanwhile on the newsstands, through Thursday, there had been no meaningful coverage in USA Today or in the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, San Francisco Chronicle, Indianapolis Star, Denver Post, Oakland Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer, to name a few that have effectively boycotted the White House press office scandal. Leo Wolinsky, deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says the Times is running its first Guckert story on Friday, focusing on the guidelines for securing White House press passes. "It's a bit late," he concedes. "We may have been a bit slow to recognize it had become a story of public interest." Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, did not return calls seeking comment on that paper's decision to not report on the story.

Meanwhile, in the blogosphere, at Media Matters, AmericaBlog and The Daily Kos, more details are being uncovered, linking Gannon/Guckert with the Thune campaign in South Dakota, which secretly paid bloggers to attack, and ultimately unseat, Senate Minority Leader Daschle. The so-called "news organization" for which G/G was supposedly a reporter has shut down its website, after first purging all of G/G's articles. G/G himself has appeared for some interviews, in which he says things that are contradictory, or bizarrely evasive. First said he was taking down his personal text website (not the escort one, which is still there) and going into seclusion because the press was hounding him, then he complained that no one was asking him about the story, although he was ignoring requests for interviews. Then he put his website back up asking for donations in his defense, and now it's going down again.

There are so many threads sticking out of this tangle that it boggles the mind that the LA Times' first story this morning reads as it does. The reporter failed to interview any of the bloggers, and the 'focus on the guidelines' seems mainly its implicit suggestion that the White House shouldn't be deciding who is or isn't a reporter. Perhaps if the LA Times had spoken to one of the bloggers, it would have learned that G/G got a press pass before he had written even one article for his first alleged news organization, GOPUSA News, the partisan website that later changed its name to Talon News.

Since the Wall Street Journal has an article with the same theme today, more cautious media consumers might wonder if this is a spin campaign. After weeks of silence, to start with "The White House shouldn't be deciding who is legitimate" angle seems like an attempt to distract from the actual facts, and the bizarre lack of answers coming from the White House and its Press Office. (I think "has written something" (he hadn't) and "is being paid by someone for it" (he wasn't) might be acceptable standards to everyone?)

Boehlert rightly notes a far less bizarre story about the possibility of a planted question got wide coverage just last December. Remember that soldier asking Rumsfeld about armor?

It involved a reporter for the Chattanooga Free Times Press, Edward Lee Pitts, who helped a National Guardsman craft a tough question posed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld regarding the lack of body armor for U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq. Rumsfeld's at-times-cavalier response created a small firestorm. ("You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.") The revelation that Pitts was involved in formulating the question, and the debate over whether he overstepped a journalistic boundary, soon became a story onto itself in the mainstream press. Unlike Guckert, who was criticized for bending the rules to toss softball questions to administration officials, Pitts was accused of bending the rules to ask a question that was too hard.

And Pitts hadn't even posted naked pictures of himself on the Internet. So why the press blackout on G/G? Heck, bloggers are doing most of the investigation themselves - a reporter could just summarize what has already been discovered and have a fine story. Are editors spiking the story? How does that work? Boehlert notes that some papers have written editorials while ignoring it on the news pages. Maybe reporters are afraid of the "exposing a reporter's personal life" angle, and missing that G/G wasn't a real reporter, and that he himself is the one who put his escort pages up for any Google search to find?

The story itself is bizarre. But the evolving story about the story is becoming a fascinating study in the behaviors and bias of the so-called liberal media.