Like all of you, I have been reading the blogs, emailing friends and waiting in anticipation for the Jeff Gannon controversy to hit my local paper, the St Louis Post-Dispatch. After two weeks, the only thing printed was a Leonard Pitts editorial last Sunday and a 3 inch brief yesterday about Dick Durbin’s letter calling for an investigation. After scanning the Internet it looks like a few papers published editorials on Gannon in the past week, but with little exception the FAKE REPORTER GAY PROSTITUTE scandal has been completely ignored as a major news story in the main stream corporate media. Read this column by Bill Press: http://www.billpress.com/columns.html
Fed up and losing patience, I just called the news desk at the St Louis Post-Dispatch to complain about their LACK OF COVERAGE on the Gannon fake reporter in the White House story. You know what they told me? THEY KNEW NOTHING ABOUT IT! He said that they get most of their national news from AP and that they had seen nothing of this story on THE WIRE! The Post-Dispatch does have a couple of reporters in Washington, but they mainly write stories with a local angle.
THIS IS PATHETIC. If the state of journalism in this country is so lazy that even major city papers rely on a couple of news wires to report for them, no wonder it is so easy to manipulate the media. There doesn't have to be a great right wing conspiracy, because all Rove needs is a few people at the news wires in his pocket to manipulate what gets published in almost every newspaper around the country. Brilliant! This really does prove the illusion of plurality or a liberal bias. There may be thousands of publications and news outlets, but if they all get their stories from the same news spigot, it isn't independent media or even real freedom of the press.
THANK GOD FOR THE INTERNET. The ability of average people to create a community and share information independent of established channels is both liberating and empowering. Imagine how much worse things would be if there was no Internet and corporate media controlled by Karl Rove was it. I am beginning to believe that if the Internet had existed in the 1930's in Germany, Hitler could have been stopped before WWII. Read this for a wake up call on historical comparison: http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0222-22.htm
Although bloggers on both sides of the political divide have had success influencing what gets in the CMSM, it seems to me that liberal bloggers had to work a lot harder and longer before their influence was reported while conservative bloggers seemed to have almost instant success. Compare the Stop Sinclair success on the left with the CBS forgery scandal on the right. Liberal Bloggers did manage to get Sinclair to alter a negative program on John Kerry, after weeks of writing to Sinclair stations, complaints to the FCC and persuading advertisers to boycott the show. However, bloggers on the right had major headlines around the country within hours of the CBS 60 minutes desputed documents report that continued for months and successfully diverted the story to this day from the substance of the documents to the inabuility of CBS to fully authenticate them. They turned the subject of the story into the media itself. Basically, `kill' the messenger and you win the message.
In a similar way now, the first reports on Gannon were not about Gannon at all, but about the supposed "liberal" bloggers unfairly attacking a "conservative" reporter because they didn't like his politics. How were right wing bloggers able to influence the initial Gannon stories as a gay-bashing invasion of privacy instead of a real scandal about journalistic ethics, national security and propaganda? I hate to be a "tin hat" conspiracy theory type, but I think Joseph Goebles has been reincarnated in Karl Rove.