Two days of training and you too can be a journalist!

I thought I'd follow up on the degree of training that "Jeff Gannon" got before being awarded a prime seat among professional from AP, UPI, u.s.w. For $50 you too can get accreditation from the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School.

The Broadcast Journalism School is a one-stop, full-service seminar for conservatives who want a career in journalism. You'll learn information you won't receive anywhere else and get personalized advice from our expert faculty . . .

An intense two-day seminar, the Broadcast Journalism School is designed to give aspiring journalists the skills necessary to bring balance to the media and succeed in this highly competitive field.

For $50, you'll receive two days of instruction, meals on Saturday and Sunday and all course materials. Limited free housing is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

I'm sure it was intense . . . Here's more on Morton Blackwell, who runs this joint:

Morton C. Blackwell (1939- ), perhaps best known as the purple heart band-aid guy from the 2004 Republican National Convention, has been in the political dirty tricks business for a long, long time.

Blackwell was executive director of the College Republican National Committee from 1965 to 1970, back when it became a school for Nixonian dirty tricks that turned out Karl Rove, Lee Atwater, Terry Dolan, and Roger Stone.

In the 1970's Blackwell worked for right-wing fundraiser Richard Viguerie and became director of the so-called Committee for Responsible Youth Politics. . . .

In 1979, Blackwell founded the Leadership Institute, which has been devoted for 25 years to turning out right-wing activists and journalists. Karl Rove is its best-known graduate.

I'm sure that "Jeff Gannon's" training was thoroughly professional and non-partisan. . . .

Deceased student

I posted an entry here a couple of days ago about hearing from the niece of a former student who had been killed in a car wreck. I decided to remove the post, as it brought this space into a more personal kind of reflection than I want it to have. One of the characteristics of blogs, and the web generally, is that once something is written, it can be modified--unless, as with the "Jeff Gannon" business noted elsewhere, it's become so notorious that people save the cached material. In this case, I would like to stick closer to rhetoric and visual rhetoric, so I'm deleting the other material.

I really hadn't intended to post about this or anything else today, and since this post mostly concerns discussions going on in CM 530 about the media, and since this blog is mostly for Engl 212 students thinking about visual culture, it may be somewhat out of place. However.

Go back a few weeks to GWBush's press conference after the inauguration, in which he was setting out his plans for the next four years and getting somewhat brisker questions from reporters, who are getting increasingly pissed off about his non-answers. Then he gets this question from someone identifying himself as Jeff Gannon of the Talon News Service:

Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you've said you are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

Most people at the conference would have characterized the person in the room most removed from reality--until that question--as the president, with his "freedom is on the march" mantra in the face of nonstop bombings and shootings in Iraq, horrific difficulties in recuiting and keeping soldiers these days, his announced plan to cut the deficit in half in four years while extending and making permanent the tax cuts for the wealthiest 1/2% which have created the deficit, and in this context most significantly, his plan to gut Social Security in order to save it. (NY Times link, reg. required, access costs $ after 2/15). The question above raised some questions about the credentials of a reporter sending out such softballs--who is the Talon News Service, anyway?

Well, it turns out to be a group organized and maintained by GOPUSA, an organization devoted to "spread[ing] the conservative message throughout America." Other people in the room are restricted to those working for actual news organizations, not propagandists for specific political agendas. So how does "Jeff Gannon" get his credentials? This question got the blogosphere stirred up a bit, and the info eventually hit World O' Crap (along with Atrios, Daily Kos, and other stalwarts): ""Jeff Gannon" is a pseudonym (even though he apparently gets daily White House passes issued in that name)," and he "obtained a B.S. degree in Education from the Pennsylvania State University System, and attended a two-day right-wing school of journalism ("the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism"). Oh, and he "lives on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC." In other words, he's a bit weak on the credentials, compared to, say, Helen Thomas.

Turns out he's also a bit, well, queer. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld reminds us, but note who he's working for.) Note the last three items on this domain list registered to his Bedrock Corp.:

Conservativeguy.com
Conservative-guy.com
Conservativelegal.com
Exposejessejackson.com
Jeffgannon.com
Theconservativeguy.com
Theconservativelegal.com
The-conservative-guy.com
conservative-guy.com
Hotmilitarystud.com
Militaryescorts.com
Militaryescortsm4m.com

"M4M" would be Men for Men. And Military Escorts is not a mercenary group.

Buzzflash has some context here:

"So in addition to taxpayer-funded payola for conservative journalists, phony news video releases in support of the Bushevik policies, psy-op journalism operations, 'leaked' lies to Bush sympathizers like Judith Miller of the NYT, the 'All Republican, All the Time' propaganda news channel known as FOX News, and a largely fawning and braindead corporate press, we now know about the right wing activists ginning up the scripted Bush public relations appearances. You know the ones that under previous administrations were actually news conferences."

I think this adds another item to the lengthening list of GW Bush as the propaganda president. No wonder Karl Rove got promoted. There really is a vast right-wing conspiracy. Get used to it, because it's not going away any time soon.

There. I feel better.

Addendum, 2/11: The story is getting into some mainstream news outlets.

CNN gets it right: "A New York congresswoman asked the White House to explain Wednesday why a man who worked for a news Web site owned by a GOP activist was able to obtain White House press credentials under an assumed name."

The point they stress is his fake credentials, in the context of administration payola given to conservative commentators (Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher)--who, at least, are identified by their real names.

NPR gets it wrong: The main point on their broadcast was "Gannon's" being outed by "liberal bloggers," rather than his activities in the context of administration efforts to convert news into propaganda.

And you don't even want to know how badly Howard Kurtz screwed things up.

One more tidbit on the propaganda machine. Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly traces how a distracting news story (about a strange man from University of Colorado, Ward Churchill) became part of the news cycle. The comments Churchill made were three years old; he's giving a talk at an obscure college in Vermont; why now?

Qui bono? You have to ask yourself who benefits.

If you want to see a smackdown of a bloviator, have a look at this post by the estimable Juan Cole of National Review figure Jonah Goldberg. Cole is a prof at UM who maintains probably the best English language source on Iraq in existence in his blog Informed Comment.

Students in CM 530 have been asking--well, one of them, at least--how it is that one can judge reliability of a news source. I think that consistency over time and expertise are pretty good starting points.

Last night I went to the symphony concert in Midland. As weblogs are (sometimes) supposed to be an account of experiences, I'll set some of these in here.

I'm keeping this blog in part about visuality, but concerts are heavily auditory. As I was late enough in deciding to go that I didn't get in on the most highly desired seats, many of my locations are very close to the stage (which I prefer to being Wayne de Back--it upsets me a little that the sound of the orchestra, when heard from the back of the hall, is so much out of sync with the conductor's movements). At times this is very good: the concert in October (I think) featured a young Russian pianist who was very good to hear (and see) up close. In this case I derived a great deal of pleasure from hearing a piece I know very well, Dvorak's 7th symphony, close enough to detach the first and second violin section, to hear the particular counterthemes being played by the cellos, etc. I couldn't watch the percussionists or wind sections, so there are always trade-offs. But a live performance has much more nuance and detail than a disc can ever have.

The featured performer this time was a flute player doing a Mozart concerto. This was not good to be close to. I don't much like Mozart: he's too orderly, too Apollonian, in general, and I much prefer some dissonance brought into my classical music. Give me Bach or Beethoven or Prokofiev. (There are exceptions, of course.) And I'm not used to hearing flute as a solo instrument, as I am piano or violin or even cello. But this performer was exceptionally distracting, visually (she played fine): she was perhaps mid-40s, but wore a shoulder-less dress that put me in mind of possible wardrobe malfunctions. The top part was patterned, in such a way that reminded me of bad upholstery material. She moved and swayed with her flute, adding emphasis and letting us know how hard she was working by moving her eyebrows--perhaps she's been watching Peter Jennings for her news--and kept leaning over and looking coquettishly up at the conductor. The Midland crowd gave her a standing O, of course, which enticed her to play a piece by Gabriel Faure, which I liked better than the Moz.

On a completely different subject (perhaps I should start a new post), Bush has done something I support. This is a first: in more than four years now I've been waiting for this moment, and apart from retaliating against the Afghan hosts of Osama bin Laden, I've not found it. Lying about going to war, cutting taxes on the rich, gutting the EPA, going back on plans to limit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, sucking up to the religious right (when I doubt his sincerity in this area), pissing off the rest of the world through his and his subordinates' arrogance--there's a long list which I could make still longer of things that I believe are short-sighted at best and evil at worst. Of particular danger is his habit of governing through propaganda and surrounding himself, at campaign appearances and in press conferences (cf. the MediaMatters piece about the plant from so-called Talon News Service, "Jeff Gannon"), with carefully screened supporters so as to present good backdrops. But in pursuit of trimming the deficit, he's proposed cutting huge agricultural subsidies (New York Times link--registration required, and access after 2/12 will cost $). We'll see whether this pisses off some of the red state rubes who voted for him enough to erode some of his support--but it's a hopeful sign that he is actually serious about the deficit, enough at least to tick off some of his corporate welfare clients.

Now, let's wait for the Daddy Warbucks faction, e.g., Halliburton . . .

Later addition (2/8): I shouldn't give Bush's team too much credit here. Proposing doesn't mean enacting, and the reactions of red-state congressmen seems to mean this part of the budget will be DOA.