For two years Jeff Gannon cut an unobtrusive figure at White House press conferences. The shaven-headed, craggily handsome man worked for an obscure news agency called Talon News. He was often the subject of jokes by colleagues from weightier news organizations.
No one is laughing now, because Gannon was far from being a harmless distraction. He was writing under a false name and working for a Republican front organization. Suddenly, his "softball" questions to White House officials looked less like eccentricities and more like plotting by an administration which has frequently displayed a dark mastery of the arts of press control.
When it emerged that Gannon was also linked to gay prostitution Web sites and might be a gay prostitute himself, the scandal as to how he was allowed daily access to the White House grew even murkier. The American media are now being forced to confront the possibility that Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, was simply a Republican plant, used by officials, including President George W. Bush, to ask easy questions in difficult press conferences.
"The idea of having a mole in the White House press corp is amazing, but that's what it looks like," said Jack Lule, a journalism professor at Lehigh University.
But the Gannon affair, which has shocked much of America's political establishment, is just the latest scandal in the media establishment. Newspapers including The New York Times and USA Today have been hit by plagiarism and forgery scandals. Other papers and television stations have been consumed with a soul-searching inquest into how they were misled about non-existent Iraqi weapons programs. Added to that is growing evidence of a White House campaign to bypass or control the media in their everyday presentation of government policy, which included paying one journalist hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote its policies.
Last week a federal watchdog warned the Bush administration that any video news releases must state that the government is the source.
Twice in two years, government departments have been accused of distributing fake news packages, using actors as journalists.
One question is dominating US newsrooms and television studios: Ignored, scandalized and now corrupted, just what are America's mainstream media for anymore?
The extent of the Bush White House's command and control of the press corps is often revealed in the seemingly innocuous White House pool reports. These are dispatches dutifully filed by a correspondent assigned to travel with Bush and contain little but lists of endless meetings, meals eaten and clothes worn. But no detail is too small to be ignored by Bush's ever-watchful press handlers. One report on Aug. 13 last year contained a remark from Bush that it was a "good question" as to who to support if Iraq's soccer team played the US in the Olympics. Officials scurried to "correct" it.
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