There really is an Iron Law of Bloviation, isn't there, whenever journos look over their shoulders at the online community? Let there be the merest touch of Blog in a story, and the print opiners will fall all over themselves displaying their bad faith.

The latest example, for which thanks to Tex, comes from Peter S. Canellos in the Boston Globe, where he's (God help us) the Washington bureau chief. Canellos, either too lazy or too stupid to understand what the Jeff Gannon story is about, dials himself up an order of the hack's favorite, the Plague on Both Their Houses, with a side of Irresponsible Bloggers for good measure. (He also comes up with a turn of phrase I've never seen before, when he contends that "the story's endurance [by which he means, the fact that the story has persisted, unless he's attributing aerobic qualities to it] reveals how influential the Washington blogosphere has become": somebody might want to inform Mr. Canellos, assuming he's teachable, about the difference between cyberspace and real, geographical space.) Let's go straight to the peroration, and see what paltry stuff passes for thought in the Globe's Washington offices:

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.

On the evidence of this passage, I'd have to say that Canellos is the spiritual cousin of John "We're Not Losing in Iraq So Long As We Don't Report It" Tierney: apparently, the only thing corporate journalism needs to have its public credibility restored is for those mean old Internets to stop talking trash about it. Jayson Blair who? Jeff Gerth who? Judith Miller who? (Boy, the Times could have saved a lot of money and effort on their Credibility Group report if they'd just talked to Canellos, huh?) If we just didn't have to keep shooing away all those pesky online pseudojournalists, people'd stop putting quotation marks around our rigorously produced, utterly trustworthy news ...

This is as naked as old-media anxiety gets. It's tough finding yourself accountable to the unwashed masses, isn't it, Peter? No doubt you wish you could just dial back the clock and find yourself safe in the cozy in-culture of the journalistic age of yore. The plagiarism reference above (excuse me, the reference to "borrowing without attribution," a much more circumspect phrasing) comes as practically a Freudian slip, given the Globe's own rather compromised history: shall I mention the name Mike Barnicle? Or perhaps I can reprint this richly ironic item of two months back, from Public Apology:

Boston Globe reporter Rebecca Price was suspended today by newspaper management pending an investigation into allegations that she had used without attribution several passages from a Boston Phoenix article in which a local academic was himself accused of lifting three paragraphs from an out-of-print biography of the Irish patriot Charles Parnell published in Australia in 1928. The Boston Globe had recently established a plagiarism desk to deal with the large volume of complaints pouring into the paper and hired Price, a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism, as its sole correspondent. Tim O'Neill, the author of the Boston Phoenix article, characterized the controversy as "ironic," a description that Price did not dispute. "That's gold," she told a reporter. "Can I use it?"

Of course, everything looks bad if you remember it.

Maybe I'd have more sympathy for Canellos if his own work in this piece weren't so ridiculously shoddy, and didn't reflect so depressingly the Beltway go-along-get-along ethos. In what way, exactly, are Jeff Gannon's critics responsible for a "legacy" of "lowered trust and expectations"—equally responsible, with Gannon himself? Apparently because, unlike Canellos, they don't take an official "no" for an answer:

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.

Now, if it's me, and I'm going to write an opinion piece about a news story, I try to inform myself about the state of play: Canellos, though, seems to have stopped paying attention sometime in, say, late February. This is what the Globe's Washington bureau chief thinks is the "linchpin" of the affair, that Gannon was planted to help Scotty when the gaggle got feisty? No, Peter, Gannon was observed to have consistently offered up softball, biased questions: but the linchpin, as you put it, is the set of discoveries those questions led to, namely Gannon's bizarrely fraught pseudonymity (did you forget about that?), his as yet unexplained access to the White House with absolutely no journalistic background or credentials. What drives the story is one's desire to account for the yet unaccounted-for (not to mention deliberately obscured) web of connections that put an ex auto-body office manager and gay webmaster, under an assumed name, into the White House press room. How hard is it to get that?

[Out of pity, by the way, both for my readers and for Canellos, I'm going to spare you the part that comes next, where we learn that Gannongate is just like the "similarly unproven charges" made against John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans, an instance of symbolic politics managing to trump substance and fact. No kidding—I couldn't make that up. Such is the power of the know-nothing hack in full Plague on Both Their Houses mode.]

Have we "glided over" official denials (of dubious relevance anyway), or simply refused to let the matter drop despite them? Which is, as I in my naivete understand it, a typical practice of investigative journalism. Canellos doesn't seem to understand it, though, or much of anything else. Authority has declared the story Over. That's good enough to squelch Peter Canellos's curiosity. (Though one suspects it might not have been, in the days when Authority worked for Bill Clinton.) But those Internet pseudojournalists—they just won't learn manners.

posted by michael  12:12:54 AM  
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