OUTSIDE THE TENT
Sex, Lies and Spies: This Isn't News?
By John Aravosis
John Aravosis is a writer and political consultant and the editor of AMERICAblog.com.
March 6, 2005
An experimental column in which the Los Angeles Times invites outside critics to slap around a newspaper whose editorial endorsed TWO candidates for mayor.
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Bloggers uncover that someone working as a reporter in the West Wing is also advertising himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort — someone whose name, a year earlier, had appeared in the U.S. attorney's subpoena of White House documents during the investigation of the Valerie Plame-CIA scandal.
The mainstream media, including the Los Angeles Times, remains largely silent. Why?
The story of James D. Guckert (a.k.a. Jeff Gannon) broke Jan. 26. It started as a blip of a controversy over a little-known "reporter" for a conservative website asking a kiss-up question at a White House briefing. Bloggers investigated "Gannon's" identity and found that he had little training in journalism and an apparent connection to male prostitution. Bloggers wanted to know how someone with this background had for two years received White House "day pass" press credentials. Within days, the story exploded online, yet it took a month for The Times to give the story a mention, and then its coverage was a textbook case of how not to write the news.
The piece cited or quoted by name five sources as well as an unnamed media critic — none expressing any outrage — as well as Guckert himself. It failed to quote the bloggers who broke this story — including me — or anyone who thought Guckert's ability to waltz through security with a pseudonym and get within a few feet of the president during a time of war might be a serious issue.
more
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-tent6mar06,1,435809.story?coll=la-util-op-edJohn also has it at
Americablog.
And at
Eschaton:)
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