Thursday, February 24, 2005

The Gannon/Guckert "scandal": a golden opportunity

I hope President Bush is reading his Bible these days. If so, here's praying that he attends closely to Proverbs 21:22 --

A wise man scales the city of the mighty
and brings down the stronghold in which they trust.

Since Democratic leadership joins call for Gannon inquiry, and various other liberal sources keep expressing outrage that an uncredentialed and politically-motivated individual could actually break into the hallowed ranks of the White House presstitute corpse [double sic on myself], I think the Bush administration should pull a deft Judo move.

They should propose performing the exact same investigation on all WH reporters. Send out a questionnaire that reflects the matters that find them in such breathless anxiety when it comes to Jeff Gannon/James Guckert. To wit:

  1. Ask if any reporter is a homosexual.
  2. Ask if any has ever exchanged sex for anything.
  3. Ask them to list all web sites with which they have ever had any involvement.
  4. Review all of their questions and articles for any bias, agenda, or tendentiousness.
  5. Ask for a list of all political associations, involvements, activities, financial giving.
  6. Once step five is completed, the same investigation must be performed on the organizations that employ them.
  7. Report the results.
The mainstream media assure us endlessly that they alone are so professional as to be wholly without bias, and concerned only with the truth.

So surely they would fully support such an effort. Right?

Ri-i-i-i-i-i-ight.

UPDATE: I see gratefully that Jeff Gannon noted the thoughts offered here, as did Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy in Media. Kincaid correctly observes that sending out my proposed questionnaire would not be the equivalent of what was done to Gannon. In that case, the reporters would have the opportunity of volunteering the requested information. In Gannon's, his trashcans were pillaged (so to speak), and his family reportedly was harrassed, in a targeted search for scandalous material.

UPDATE II: Cliff Kincaid has another fine essay putting the accusations against Gannon into perspective.

2 comments:

David the Gyromancer said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
David the Gyromancer said...

Oh please. Mr. Guckert apparently advertised himself in plain sight, so the invasion of the personal lives of real journalists could not be more inapposite. But the REAL issues are (a) the fact that Guckert is a total fake, not a real journalist, and that he was a plant put in the press corps with the full knowledge of Karl Rove, Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. And (b) that he is such a god-awfully insufferable hypocrite. Get a clue, wingnuts.