crossing the line

Okay, we get it. The Bush (mis)Administration doesn’t like the provision in the Bill of Rights guaranteeing a free press. It’s been apparent since they took office, not just after president Chimpy McFratParty flipped off the White House press corps after (finally) being mildly challenged at a news conference.

They broke with tradition and back-benched the dean of the White House press corps, Helen Thomas, because she dared to do her job and ask pointed questions. They’ve double- and triple-talked any reporter who asked for a straight answer from spokesmen who lie casually, consistently and with calculation.

The Bush (mis)Administration, for that matter the entire Republican, operates on the theory that, as long as they keep saying something is true, that it will be. Which is why they have gutted education with a program laughingly entitled No Child Left Behind and gutted air quality with a clean skies initiative. It’s why they tell us we’re doing just fine in Iraq and that a deal to turn over control to our ports to the United Arab Emirates is a good idea.

Disdain for the press is nothing new. Lyndon Johnson is the one who coined the nickname for former CNN tag team Evans and Novak: Errors and No Facts. Hell, George Washington was savaged by the press of his day.

This latest bit reported by Salon.com, however, is enough to piss off anyone who has ever called themselves a journalist:

“Government officials doing advance work for the president's trip to the Gulf Coast last week fooled at least one local resident into believing they were reporters from Fox News.
“Jerry Akins, whose construction site of a home Bush ended up visiting, tells the paper that two men approached him before Bush's trip, told him they worked for Fox News in Texas, and asked if they could look around as part of a "scouting mission" for a story on post-Katrina construction. Akins -- who had no idea the president was coming -- let the men look around and take pictures. Only after Bush had come and gone, Akins says, did the men tell him they were actually part of the president's team.
“Akins assumes they were Secret Service agents. A spokesman for the Secret Service said agents wouldn't normally pose as reporters and suggested that maybe the men were members of the military or the White House staff.
“Akins says he doesn't mind being duped; he got his picture taken with the president out of the deal. But the Poynter Institute's Aly Colon tells the Sun Herald that having government agents pose as reporters undermines the public's trust in journalism. "It creates, at the least, some confusion in the public's minds," Colon says. "The key to journalism is credibility. So what the public wants to be able to do is trust people and organizations who represent themselves as part of the journalistic community."
“We might say the same about people who represent themselves as part of the federal government.”

It’s a well-known secret that our government has hidden behind journalists for undercover work for ages. But to expand that façade to this extent is the stuff of despots. Journalists have been kidnapped and tortured during this (mis)administration’s laughably titled War on Terror – no doubt accused of being spies or government operatives. More journalists from around the world have been killed covering Iraq and Afghanistan than died covering World War II or Vietnam. And the (mis)administration made overtures about bombing Al Jazeera headquarters to stifle its coverage of Iraq – coverage that was beyond their control and done by reporters who spoke the language and were not imbedded and under U.S. military control.

I am a journalist. And I condemn these small-minded zealots. There is no end to the ways in which they have wiped their collective asses with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The first job of the next, Democratic administration will undoubtedly have to be having their stains removed from our founding documents.

More soon.