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