Truthout: The News Is Broken By William Rivers Pitt
Something like that might have once existed, but it is almost completely gone now. The sad and sordid tale of Jeff "Don't Call Me Guckert" Gannon" is a final nail in the coffin, as far as I am concerned. This story went from irritating to outrageous to appalling to downright nauseating and scary in rapid succession.
I went into great detail on the "Gannon" phenomenon in my blog, but this is it in a nutshell: An avowed conservative partisan managed to boll-weevil his way into the White House Briefing Room, where he was the go-to guy for administration spokesman Scott McLellan whenever the questions from the press corps got too hot for comfort. His final exposure came in exactly this fashion, when he manufactured quotes by Senators Clinton and Reid in order to score points off Democrats while hauling McLellan's chestnuts out of the fire during a press briefing on Bush's hare-brained Social Security plan. He managed to do this without even using his real name, which is actually James Guckert.
This is journalism today, and "Gannon" isn't alone in disgrace. Conservative columnist Armstrong Williams got paid more than a quarter of a million dollars by the Bush administration to peddle No Child Left Behind. Conservative columnist Maggie Gallagher got $21,500 to peddle Bush's ideas on marriage. Conservative columnist Mike McManus got $10,000 to pitch the same policy as Gallagher.
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