White House Press Corps
If you ever had a doubt about the White House Press Corps’ antipathy towards the Bush administration this footage 2/3rds of the way into the clip should lay that doubt to rest.
If you ever had a doubt about the White House Press Corps’ antipathy towards the Bush administration this footage 2/3rds of the way into the clip should lay that doubt to rest.
I guess after six years of tighly-reigned press conferences and accessibility, formidable deceptions, retaliations for reporting facts rtaher than what the White House spins and generally being treated like children, the press corps should have a good reason to have antipathy.
> formidable deceptions
Nunya Bidnis, can you back up your assertion with evidence?
“Another reason for the press’s complacency is that many of these tactics are nothing new. Reporters have always engaged in a complex push-me/pull-you relationship with the President, alternately sucking up and pulling down as the political tides rose and fell. More than thirty years ago, Daniel Patrick Moynihan observed in Commentary that “in most essential encounters between the Presidency and the press, the advantage is with the former. The President has a near limitless capacity to ‘make’ news which must be reported…. The President also has considerable capacity to reward friends and punish enemies in the press corps…. Finally, a President who wishes can carry off formidable deceptions.” What’s unprecedented is the degree to which this Administration has employed these efforts to undermine the journalist’s democratic function.”
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050509/alterman/5
“By my count, ‘Jeff Gannon’ is now at least the sixth ‘journalist’ (four of whom have been unmasked so far this year) to have been a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or a barely arms-length ally like Talon News while simultaneously appearing in print or broadcast forums that purport to be real news. Of these six, two have been syndicated newspaper columnists paid by the Department of Health and Human Services to promote the administration’s ‘marriage’ initiatives….
“The pre-fab ‘Ask President Bush’ town hall-style meetings held during last year’s campaign (typical question: ‘Mr. President, as a child, how can I help you get votes?’) were carefully designed for television so that, as Kenneth R. Bazinet wrote last summer in New York’s Daily News, ‘unsuspecting viewers’ tuning in their local news might get the false impression they were ‘watching a completely open forum.’…
When the Bush administration isn’t using taxpayers’ money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory,
“Even now, we know that the fake news generated by the six known shills is only a small piece of the administration’s overall propaganda effort. President Bush wasn’t entirely joking when he called the notoriously meek March 6, 2003, White House press conference on the eve of the Iraq invasion ’scripted’ while it was still going on.
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Manufactured_journalism
Bush repeatedly lies and deceives the American people via the media. By its own admission, the White House has:
1. Planted fake news stories on local TV stations to push its agenda
2. Put journalists on the government payroll.
3. Had supposed independent journalists testify to Congress when they were being paid off by the govt.
4. Paid off journalists to push its agenda in the larger media.
5. Launched unprecendented tactics to subpoena a number of reporters and try and force them to reveal confidential sources — all about a story concerning a White House member who broke the law by revealing a CIA agent’s identity, thus endangering the lives of friends to the US around the world.
6. And now, planted fake journalists in the White House press room and passed them CIA documents to push its agenda.
The latest media manipulation?
Bush appeared at the Commerce Department with what he pretended was an independent expert to push his fight against class-action lawsuits. That person, Walter E. Dellinger III, is no independent expert who has seen the light on this issue: he and his law firm are paid lobbyists, receiving $780,000 in the last few years to push for the legislation. Can you imagine? Bush made a point of saying Dellinger had worked for the Clinton Administration — as if that proved his bona fides — but didn’t mention the guy was a shill for the people pushing to change the laws. The President lied. This should be scandalous. But they’ve done it so often it was blown off in an inside story in the New York Times.
http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/more-white-house-deception-in-media-la.html
Continued violence in Iraq, a struggling economy, an unpopular plan to privatize Social Security, homeland security left underfunded while the rich get giant tax cuts … what’s a White House to do when the news about its policies isn’t favorable? Fake it. An explosive, front-page New York Times story this weekend exposes President Bush’s vast manipulation of the media and White House attempts to manipulate public opinion. Over the past four years, it turns out at least 20 different federal agencies have been involved in producing hundreds – yes, hundreds – of fake TV news segments, many of which were “subsequently broadcast on local stations across the country without any acknowledgement of the government’s role in their production.” In fact, since President Bush took office, the White House has spent at least $254 million on these fake segments and other public relations ploys to spread positive propaganda about his policies. President Bush has paid lip service to the concept of a free press, saying in January 2005, “there needs to be a nice, independent relationship between the White House and the press, the administration and the press.” He also claimed “our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet.” Here’s what happens when it can’t:
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/site/pp.asp?c=klLWJcP7H&b=457409
George W. Bush has a forthright speaking style which convinces many people that he’s telling the truth even when he’s lying. But in under three years, Bush has told at least as many impressive untruths as each of his three predecessors. (See The Mendacity Index, p.27) His style of deception is also unique. When Reagan said he didn’t trade arms for hostages, or Clinton insisted he didn’t have sex with “that woman,” the falsity of the claims was readily provable–by an Oliver North memo or a stained blue dress. Bush and his administration, however, specialize in a particular form of deception: The confidently expressed, but currently undisprovable assertion. In his State of the Union address last January, the president claimed that Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaeda and a robust nuclear weapons program, and that therefore we needed to invade Iraq. Even at the time, many military and intelligence experts said that the president’s assertions probably weren’t true and were based on at best fragmentary evidence. But there was no way to know for sure unless we did what Bush wanted. When the president said on numerous occasions that his tax cuts–which were essentially long-term rate reductions for the wealthy–would spur growth without causing structural deficits, most experts, again, cried foul, pointing out that both past experience and accepted economic theory said otherwise. But in point of fact nobody could say for sure that maybe this time the cuts might not work.
This summer, when it became clear that Iraq had no active nuclear weapons program–indeed showed no apparent evidence of any weapons of mass destruction at all–that the economy was still losing jobs, and that the administration’s own budget office predicted deficits as far as it dared project, Bush’s reputation for honesty took a turn for the worse. By the middle of July, only 47 percent of adults surveyed by Time/CNN said they felt they could trust the president, down from 56 percent in March. The president’s response to all this was to make yet more confidently expressed, undisprovable assertions. He simply insisted that his tax cuts would create jobs–and who knows? Perhaps someday they will–and that American forces would eventually turn up evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But by then, the press was beginning to pick up on deceptions in other policy areas–the redaction of evidence of global warming in EPA reports, the administration’s refusal to provide Congress with any estimates whatsoever about the costs of the occupation of Iraq. The White House seemed guilty of what might be called persistent, chronic up-is-downism, the tendency to ridicule the possibility that a given policy might actually have its predictable adverse consequences, to deny those consequences once they have already occurred, or–failing that–to insist against all evidence that those consequences were part of the plan all along. By late July, even a paragon of establishment conservatism like Barron’s columnist Alan Abelson was lamenting the president’s “regrettable aversion to the truth and reality when the truth and reality aren’t lovely or convenient.”
The president and his aides don’t speak untruths because they are necessarily people of bad character. They do so because their politics and policies demand it…
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0309.marshall.html
Based on the quotes you provided it appears that your position is that President Bush formidably deceived the White House Press Corps (WHPC) by hiring reporters to promote his point of view and approving their entry into the WHPC. However, you have not provided evidence that the President did this. The closest you’ve gotten to this is to provide evidence that government agencies hired people to promote their point of view and that there was room for more disclosure by these individuals.
That said, until you clarify what you meant by “formidable deceptions” I’ll assume that your position is that President Bush has formidably deceived the WHPC.
More comments below…
Quoting Alterman’s assertion does not constitute evidence that President Bush has engaged the Press Corps in “formidable deceptions”. You’ve provided evidence that Alterman agrees with you, not evidence that the President formidably deceived the press corps.
By the author’s own admission Gannon was possibly not hired by the President so this is not evidence that President Bush has engaged the WHPC in “formidable deceptions”.
Actually, this is what the President said: “I have asked, and Walter Dellinger has kindly agreed to come. He is a practicing attorney. He is a professor. He’s so good at being an attorney, he’s teaching others how to be an attorney, at Duke University, if I’m not mistaken. He was telling me today — I don’t know if you know this or not, this falls in the “small world” category — and if our mutual friend is listening on C-SPAN, it will blow his mind we’re talking about him — but I was raised in Midland, Texas, and the fellow who lives across the street from him in North Carolina’s father, was the baby doctor for my three little brothers. (Laughter.) Now, how about that for small world? Tell Rodin hello.”
I do not see how this is evidence that President Bush has engaged the Press Corps in “formidable deceptions”.
Are you contending that the content of the segments is false?
So by quoting this are you amending your position to be something akin to: “President Bush has formidably and confidently expressed undisprovable assertions to the WHPC”?