White House press corps mixes mainstream, odd
`Journalists' loosely defined, screened
chicagotribune.com
By Johanna Neuman
Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times
Published February 27, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Its members work inside one of the most secure facilities in the nation, the White House, and they get to question America's most senior leaders, including the president.
Yet the White House press corps is not the thoroughly screened and scrubbed journalistic elite Americans might presume. Along with stars of the country's major media organizations, it has long included eccentrics and fringe players.
And now, a semi-impostor has forced the White House and the mainstream reporters covering it to address a basic question:
What is a journalist?
It is a question the press corps and White House officials have tended to duck in the past, each for their own reasons.
For reporters, policing the ranks smacks of undermining the 1st Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press. For White House officials, it has always seemed like an invitation to endless argument about who should be in and who should not.
Last month, the subject broke into the open after a reporter for the Web site Talon News asked President Bush how he could work on Social Security and other domestic initiatives with Democrats "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality."
The openly scornful and seemingly partisan description of congressional Democrats startled some veterans of the White House press room. And they wondered how Bush came to call on the relatively obscure reporter--not just this time, but on previous occasions as well.
Bloggers soon revealed that the reporter, whom colleagues knew as Jeff Gannon, was really named James Dale Guckert. They also disclosed that Talon News was owned by an avowedly partisan Web site called GOPUSA. The Web site in turn was the creation of a conservative Texas political activist named Bobby Eberle.
That stirred a furor over how a seeming Republican agent got clearance to attend White House briefings as a journalist. Soon Gannon resigned.
No permanent press pass
Gannon did not have a permanent White House press pass, the "hard pass" that requires an FBI background check. Those who carry it have clear access to the White House and frequently travel with the president. And the Standing Committee of Correspondents on Capitol Hill, which accredits more than 2,000 journalists who write for daily news organizations, refused to give Gannon a congressional press pass.
But Gannon was admitted to the White House on a regular basis over the past two years. Applying as Guckert, he was given a series of one-day passes.
Marlin Fitzwater, former press secretary to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said he created day passes in response to a federal court decision in the late 1970s requiring the White House to admit all journalists unless the Secret Service deemed them threats.
The lawsuit involved Robert Sherrill of The Nation, who was denied a press pass on the Secret Service's recommendation because, it turned out, he had punched out the press secretary to the governor of Florida.
Since then, the White House press corps has attracted an array of personalities. There was Naomi Nover of the Nover News Service. It was unclear whether her work was published, but Nover--whose white hair somewhat resembled George Washington's wig--got past a security cordon during a Reagan trip to China after a reporter showed guards a U.S. dollar bill as evidence of her importance.
Lester Kinsolving, conservative radio commentator, wore a clerical collar to White House briefings in the Reagan years. His loud voice and offbeat, argumentative questions often provoked laughter.
President Bill Clinton, to lighten the proceedings, often called on Sarah McLendon, who worked for a string of small newspapers in Texas and called herself a citizen journalist.
A liberal slant too
"If you look at the question Gannon asked, it obviously reflected his conservative views," Fitzwater said.
"But it's no different from the ones Helen Thomas [the liberal star formerly of United Press International, now of Hearst] asked of Reagan, or Dan Rather [of CBS] asked in his more famous comments about Richard Nixon."
"I have always thought it was dangerous for the White House to get into the business of defining who is and is not a member of the press corps," said Clinton White House press secretary Mike McCurry.
"That is better done by the news media."
Reporters, too, seem reluctant to get into the fray. The White House Correspondents Association met last week with White House spokesman Scott McClellan, but no action has been taken.
"We wanted to err on the side of inclusion," said Steve Scully of C-SPAN, who serves on the executive board. "Once you start dictating who is a journalist, you go down a slippery slope."
"I look at the Gannon story--I used to refer to him as Jeff GOP--as demonstrating the impact of televising the press briefing," said Martha Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University in Towson, Md., outside Baltimore. She specializes in studying the White House press corps.
"The television lens has brought into the briefing room people who have a political viewpoint and find the briefing a way to express it." |
