Gannon's story left critics tarnished, too
WASHINGTON -- Jeff Gannon's 15 minutes of fame is running a little long, with a lengthy profile in June's Vanity Fair in which the onetime White House reporter for a website run by a Republican fund-raiser talks about his newfound celebrity.
Gannon's odd journey -- which began after he asked a comically flattering question to President Bush at a news conference in January, continued when numerous bloggers attacked him as a Republican operative planted amid the press corps, and took an odd turn when photos of him as a gay prostitute showed up on the Internet -- is a landmark: the first Washington scandal based entirely in cyberspace. It started with a website, was exposed and pursued by online journalists, and featured sordid pictures from the Internet.
The story's endurance reveals how influential the Washington blogosphere has become, and how it spills over into popular culture. Newspapers, including the Globe, gave the story far more modest coverage, mainly short reports on inside pages. But Web logs continued to harp on it, embedding it in the broader political culture. Then, with politicians and late-night comics referring to it, the story became fodder for columnists, editorialists, and, now, glossy magazines.
But the Gannon tale also stands as a cautionary tale of the dangers of smoke-and-mirrors journalism in the Internet age.
Despite the sex pictures, the linchpin of the scandal was always the allegation that Bush and/or his press secretary, Scott McClellan, catered to Gannon so that his softball questions would make the president look good. Having Gannon in the press room allowed McClellan to change the subject whenever a mainstream reporter began to bore in with a tough line of questioning, according to the bloggers who promoted the story.
But the allegation was never proven. McClellan argued that he called on questioners in a routine manner, getting to Gannon only after fielding inquiries from larger news outlets in a fairly predictable order. Veteran White House correspondents backed him up. Meanwhile, McClellan maintained that his office did not give Gannon favorable treatment in getting a press pass. Former White House press secretaries from the Clinton administration generally sided with McClellan.
At that point, despite the lurid aspects of Gannon's past, most newspapers gave up on the matter as a news story. But many bloggers glided over McClellan's denials, simply asserting that Gannon was a plant intended to help the White House avoid thorny questions. Late-night comics filled out the image of Gannon as a White House plant. Pretty soon even experienced journalists were lumping Gannon together with the established news that the White House paid columnists to advance its proposals and produced its own news reports for local TV channels.
Even though it was never established that the White House had anything to do with promoting Gannon, he came to symbolize the Bush administration's efforts to manipulate the media. For those predisposed against the administration, Gannon represented a truthful charge against Bush, even if some of the claims about him were not literally true. To those predisposed to support the administration, Gannongate was not news at all, just a baseless charge that found resonance in a liberal media culture.
In many respects, the Gannon scandal followed a similar trajectory as the similarly unproven allegations of the swift boat veterans who claimed that John Kerry had lied about his military service: Newspapers could not verify any of the allegations except one that Kerry himself acknowledged. But the veterans' TV ads nonetheless commanded wide coverage as symbols of Kerry's weaknesses as a presidential candidate.
Few would argue that the Internet is responsible for all, or even many, of the weaknesses of the Washington journalism culture. But online journalism's ability to transmit loaded anecdotes, images, and symbols to specialty audiences with an ideological hunger for them has helped create a culture in which all news comes with quotation marks around it.
In response, many mainstream news outlets have vowed to police their standards of fairness and accuracy more aggressively, to establish a clearer contrast with some of their online brethren. But these efforts, such as the recent resignation of a USA Today reporter for borrowing two quotes from a sister paper without attribution, may have backfired: The public remembers only the suggestion of wrongdoing, not the rigorous efforts to explain and atone for any lapses.
This furthers the Internet-fueled perception that all media are untrustworthy, unless they conform to one's exact expectations. The lowered trust and expectations are small but significant legacies of both the pseudojournalism of Jeff Gannon and some of his most intense critics.
Peter S. Canellos is the Globe's Washington bureau chief. National Perspective is his weekly analysis of events in the capital and beyond.
