SCULPTING THE PRESS

Now that the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert story has made Keith Olbermann's "Countdown" newsquiz, it's safe to say the mainstream media have taken notice of the latest White House farce. True, it was the last question in the quiz, No. 14:

Name one of the other websites registered to Jeff Gannon/James Guckert besides "jeffgannon.com".

+ zombo.com
+ hotmilitarystuds.com
+ bloggermann.msnbc.com
+ mulletsgalore.com

The correct answer, of course, is "hotmilitarystuds.com" -- although, as Maureen Dowd notes this morning in "Bush's Barberini Faun" in The New York Times, Gannon/Guckert (now, courtesy of Dowd, a k a B'sBF) was also associated with Workingboys.net, Militaryescorts.com, MilitaryescortsM4M.com and Meetlocalmen.com. How does such "an enterprising young man ... get to question the president of the United States?" she asks. (The real Barberini Faun, at right.)

Well, here other various mainstreamers explaining it: Howard Kurtz yesterday in The Washington Post; Joe Strupp yesterday in Editor & Publisher; Jim Shea yesterday in the Hartford Courant; Joe Conason yesterday in the New York Observer; Sidney Blumenthal yesterday in London's Guardian; and Frank Rich coming on Sunday in the Times -- to name just a half dozen, all of whom are playing catchup.

Dowd answers the question with her own question:

I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the "Barberini Faun" is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?

Which pretty much explains how fishy things are. The Bush regime is "waging a jihad against journalists," Dowd notes -- and she's exactly right -- "buying them off so they'll promote administration programs, trying to put them in jail for doing their jobs and replacing them with ringers."

Our poet in residence Leon Freilich makes light of the issue:

I.D., I.D., HO

Who're the plants and who're the shills?
Try to guess --
Welcome all to Capitol Hill's
Meet the Press.

But that's whistling past the graveyard, if you ask me.

Postscript: Freilich's retort:

FAKE REPORTERS COVERING A FAKE PRESIDENT

And if I laugh at any mortal thing,
'Tis that I may not weep.
--Lord Byron

To laugh rather than to barf,
Is a far better thing by harf.
--Lowly Me

February 17, 2005 11:30 AM |

Categories:

Me Elsewhere

'WILD SIDE' STILL ROCKS 

Nelson Algren was one of the great American authors of the 20th century, it is no exaggeration to say, and among the most neglected. Consider his underrated classic, "A Walk on the Wild Side." The title -- popularized and co-opted as an idiomatic phrase by Hollywood and Madison Avenue (institutions Algren loathed) -- is familiar to most anyone who speaks English or knows Lou Reed's lyrics. But the novel itself? Hardly.

BUSTER KEATON REVISITED 
Buster Keaton: Tempest in a Flat Hat is not a biography. "This book is merely a fan's notes," Edward McPherson writes in the introduction, although his publisher ignores the disclaimer and calls it a biography on the cover. In fact, the book is a bit of both, a difficult combination to bring off unless you're David Thomson, who set the standard with Rosebud, his penetrating rumination on the life and career of Orson Welles, which was nothing if not a distillation of every obsessive thought he ever had about the myth and the man and all his movies.
LAUREN BACALL, STILL SALTY AT 80 
When Lauren Bacall writes that her singing voice ranges "somewhere between B minus sharp and outer space," she's being candid and funny. It's not every stage star with two Tony Awards for best actress in a musical whose vocal talent offers so little promise. (OK, Harvey Fierstein excepted.) Still less would one admit it.
THE STARS ACCORDING TO BOGDANOVICH 
Peter Bogdanovich's superb collection of movie-star profiles and interviews -- a sequel to Who the Devil Made It, his interviews of top film directors -- begins with an affectionate tale about Orson Welles that reminds us just how intimate the author's connection to Hollywood's greatest has been. But contrary to what we've come to expect from dime-a-dozen celebrities and celebrity interviews not worth two cents, the tale avoids bromidic egotism and journalistic platitudes.
SAMMY'S WHITE DREAMS 
Four decades ago Lenny Bruce sentenced Sammy Davis Jr. to "30 years in Biloxi," stripping him of "his Jewish star" and "his religious statue of Elizabeth Taylor." Now we have two new biographies of Davis that spring him from ridicule, if not from doubts about his legacy, and restore a measure of dignity to a black entertainer whose huge fame and success never overcame his devout wish -- indeed his lifelong effort -- to be white.
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This page contains a single entry by CriticalMASS published on February 17, 2005 11:30 AM.

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