Just to be fair and add a little balance.....
http://online.wsj.com/public/article...html?mod=blogs
White House Press Room as Political Stage
By CHRISTOPHER COOPER and JOHN D. MCKINNON
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
February 25, 2005; Page B1
WASHINGTON -- The question at the regular White House press briefing on Feb. 1 came straight out of left field: "Does the president believe in Commandment No. 6 -- 'Thou shalt not kill' -- as it applies to the U.S. invasion of Iraq?"
White House spokesman Scott McClellan didn't miss a beat. "Go ahead, next question," he said to the roomful of reporters.
Mr. McClellan's rebuff notwithstanding, the questioner, former Ralph Nader campaign volunteer Russell Mokhiber, got his first entry of the month for a Web diary he writes called "Scottie & Me (formerly Ari & I)." The diary, made up entirely of exchanges between Mr. Mokhiber and the president's chief spokesman, is a standing feature for the Common Dreams News Center, an organization of self-described progressives.
Both the question and the questioner exemplify a steady evolution that has occurred in the White House briefing room in recent years. Once the clubby preserve of big-name newspapers and networks, it has lately become a political stage where a growing assortment of reporters, activists and bloggers function not only as journalists but as participants in a unique form of reality TV.
The power of the presidency has always attracted offbeat characters to the White House briefing room. But the trend accelerated in the late 1990s, when cable outlets like C-SPAN began broadcasting the White House briefing in its entirety. That has drawn more fringe journalists seeking a forum to voice their points of view. The trend has been further fueled in recent years by the rise of alternative media, Internet news sites and Web logs that have given just about everyone who wants it a platform for punditry.
The result is that "the entire nature of the briefing has changed," says former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart. "It's become a show."
The show's plot took a dramatic twist after a man known as Jeff Gannon piped up with a question that harshly criticized Democrats during a nationally televised press conference by President Bush in January. Liberal bloggers went to work researching the man, a reporter for an obscure conservative news site, and quickly discovered that he was writing under a pseudonym and also had registered domain names for several Web sites with sexually suggestive names. The man, whose legal name is James D. Guckert, quickly resigned from his reporting position at Talon News, a site staffed mostly with volunteers and bankrolled by a Texas Republican named Bobby Eberle.
While Mr. Gannon has attracted a lot of attention, other lesser-known reporters have traveled a similar path to get inside the White House bubble. He never received a White House press pass because he lacks a congressional pass, which is one of the requirements for permanent clearance into the White House. Instead, like other reporters without permanent credentials, he gained access to the White House briefing room by getting a daily press-office clearance through security.
Before such clearance is granted, security officials do a fast check based on the petitioner's date of birth and Social Security number. White House officials and Mr. Gannon himself say he used his real name rather than his pseudonym to get his clearance.
Mr. Gannon believes he was singled out by liberal bloggers for investigation because he is a conservative. "Am I a partisan? Absolutely," he says. "I never said I was anything else."
Another reporter who frequents the briefing room, Bill Jones, has written for a news organization called Executive Intelligence Review that lists perennial candidate Lyndon LaRouche as its founder and contributing editor on its Web site. Mr. Jones often asks tough questions about the administration's foreign policy and intelligence record, according to transcripts and other reporters. Mr. Jones didn't return calls or e-mails seeking comment.
Over the years, the White House press corps has included an array of characters -- Naomi Nover, for one, who inherited her husband's press pass after he died.
Barnet Nover had founded Nover News Service in 1971, after retiring from the Denver Post's Washington bureau, in an effort to keep his column on foreign policy going. After he died two years later, Ms. Nover attempted to keep the news service alive but did less and less reporting over time. Nonetheless, she went on virtually every overseas White House press trip until her death, in 1995. "Pretend journalist loved D.C.," said the headline on her obituary in the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.
The Clinton White House was kinder, issuing a statement praising Ms. Nover for her "years of dedication to her craft."
In the Clinton era, a voluble Baltimore radio talk-show host, Les Kinsolving, asked questions that annoyed the White House press office to the point that it briefly considered barring him, but decided against it out of concern for a backlash among right-wing media.
On his Web site, Mr. Kinsolving proudly displays quotations about him from eight White House press secretaries, most of them concerning how outrageous his questions can be.
But the atmosphere for fringe journalists of all stripes is getting decidedly less friendly, thanks in part to the rise of blogs. Last week, for example, Mr. Mokhiber, the Web diarist, took a shot from Accuracy in Media, a group that frequently attacks what it sees as the liberal bias of the press. AIM compared Mr. Mokhiber to Mr. Gannon.
"Left-Wing Activist Poses as Reporter at White House Press Briefings," said the site, which pointed out that Mr. Mokhiber had no journalism training and that he limited his questioning to offbeat subjects such as industrial hemp, the possibility of war-crimes charges against Mr. Bush and Israel's 1967 attack on the USS Liberty.
Mr. Mokhiber rejects the comparison with Mr. Gannon. But like him, Mr. Mokhiber doesn't deny bias, adding that that shouldn't be a disqualifier. "Who's to decide if you're getting a check from General Electric Corp., and working for NBC, that you don't have a political bias?" Mr. Mokhiber says.
For about the last four years, Mr. Mokhiber, a volunteer for Mr. Nader's 2004 presidential campaign and former board member of his charity, has been showing up at West Wing press briefings. Generally, he toils in relative obscurity, putting out his Web diary and publishing "Corporate Crime Reporter," a weekly newsletter that he says goes out to about 200 clients and provides him with a modest living.
The question about the Sixth Commandment is fairly representative of Mr. Mokhiber's Web feature -- in the past year, he has asked Mr. McClellan whether President Bush believes in deliberately misleading reporters during wartime, whether the president knows off the top of his head how many soldiers have died in Iraq, and whether the White House counsel has prepared for the possibility that President Bush will be hauled up on war crimes.
In the wake of the Gannon incident, Mr. McClellan has said that he is considering tightening the standards for admission to briefings. Mr. Lockhart, the former spokesman for Mr. Clinton as well as John Kerry, thinks the standards have grown too loose, allowing political operatives in.
But drawing that line won't be easy. And some think there's a risk that something valuable will be lost in the process. "The fact is that the history and tradition of the White House have been much more open and accepting" of nonmainstream journalists than other Washington institutions, such as the Congress, says Ari Fleischer, Mr. McClellan's predecessor. "I think it would be a real shame if that tradition ended. It might be good for the press secretary but not for diversity of opinion."
Threaded Mode
