 |
White House Press Corps; the epitome of disgrace
Rest in peace.
You have pronounced yourself DOA.
Get on your knees, unzip Bush’s pants, and swallow the lies without a question. You have become the crack whores of journalism.
 |
- The White House Press Corpse - Rest in Peace - TVNL Editorial
- An Open Letter to the White House Press Corps
Following Ari's Footsteps - Long-squelched grumbling about Fleischer are finally surfacing. Reporters complain about his propaganda-pushing, his relentless spin and his dogged refusal to say anything substantive. Asking Fleischer a follow-up question is about as useful as punching a wall. The usual mangled speech but Bush is let off the hook in rare press conference - It didn't reveal much, but the White House press corps were grateful for anything. George Bush's press conference yesterday was only the ninth he has held in 30 months of office and a offered rare chance for reporters to get to grips with the most disciplined, and arguably the most secretive, White House of modern times. Except that they didn't.- As usual, reporters did not follow up each other's questions - The main lesson to emerge from the 50-minute session, the first since the invasion of Iraq four months ago, was how easily the chief executive evaded any serious damage - and how the reporters made it easy for him to do so. How Bush shuns the media - "But news conferences offer an important mechanism for the American people to see their president answer questions on the panoply of issues facing the country. And they give the president, as he prepares for the grilling, a useful refresher course on the workings of his administration." - Yet the White House can let months go by without giving the press any extended opportunity to ask questions of the president. - Reporters lob questions at White House spokesmen, but elements of the media have become increasingly frustrated at the lack of opportunity to hear directly from the president. - It noted that Mr. Bush had held just eight solo news conferences in his two-and-a-half years in power. At the same stage of their terms, Bill Clinton had held 33 such events and the first President Bush 61. Forcing news out of the president - In the battle between President Bush and the Washington press corps, the president usually wins. - TVNL comment: There is no battle! The press corps do not put up any fight. They are timid frightened children and they are an embarrassment to journalists world wide! Bush's not-ready-for- prime-time players - President George W. Bush says he isn't interested in spin or stagecraft. But that doesn't mean he won't try to outfox the White House press corps as often as he can--as he did at last week's press conference in the Rose Garden, his first solo run in nearly five months. Bush and senior aides, including new press secretary Scott McClellan, had been planning the encounter for weeks, and Bush had gone over possible questions the day before in the Oval Office. (His staff predicted nearly every one.) To leave nothing to chance, the team decided in advance which journalists Bush would call upon and created a crib sheet of their names. And White House officials gave reporters only 90 minutes' notice--a ploy to prevent them from preparing their questions too carefully and generally to keep them off balance. Bush seemed to enjoy the give-and-take, aides say, but America shouldn't expect a repeat performance anytime soon, and certainly not in prime time. Bush thinks those events tend to become media spectaculars in which reporters preen for the television audience and try to play "gotcha" with him. Bush's Media Barbecue: No Grilling - President Treats Press To Off-the-Record Bash - Though the combined audience of the assembled news outlets is in the tens if not hundreds of millions, the words uttered by the president and Laura Bush cannot be conveyed to the public -- the White House required that the conversations be off the record. It was the first such gathering of the full press corps at Bush's ranch and the second of its kind in Bush's presidency. - TVNL Asks: How unethical is this? More secrets! Off the record discussions with the very members of the press who are supposed to hold this guy accountable? They are not supposed to be buddies! This, as did the embedded reportes in Iraq, creats personal relationships between the reporter and the subject which in effect is a conflict of interest. The reporter can no longer be expected to report on a “personal friend” with the same nutrality as a stranger. This is completly unethical. “The White House Press Corps Has Turned Into a Full Time Press Agency For The President” – Harpers’ Rick MacArthur on Bush’s Secretive Thanksgiving Trip to Iraq - Well, it's just symbolic of the -- of the king and his courtiers. That's what it looks like to me. The king has almost complete control over the courtier press, and anybody who dares to contradict the king or to challenge the king will be beheaded in a professional sense. In other words, if one of those reporters, one of those 13 reporters that had broken the embargo figured out a way to get the news that the President was in Baghdad, done their job as a reporter, which is to tell the news, that's big news, obviously that the President has risked his life and the people in the plane with him in a sense to go do a photo opportunity, to do an advertisement, that reporter would be drummed out of the White House press corps. They wouldn't be in the White House press corps anymore. They would get kicked out. They would have their credentials revoked, you can be sure. Media's silence speaks clearly about their loyalties - The Washington press corps apparently decided that respecting one journalist's dubious secrecy pledge outweighed any professional duty to get to the bottom of a nasty, and potentially explosive, instance of deceit and reprisal. Why didn't America's top journalists grill Bush on Iraq War? - Allowing President George W. Bush to duck hard questions and not demanding the difficult answers, American reporters failed to support our troops in Iraq whose causality numbers increase, day by day. They similarly failed our nation, waiting for answers about a war that could have been avoided. - TVNL Comment: The obvious answer...they are NOT America’s TOP journalists. They are America’s CORPORATE journalists. Phony journalist/Pimping for the White House - Here's a summary: For more than two years, a reporter named Jeff Gannon turned up at White House briefings and press conferences, where he asked softball questions with a decidedly pro-Bush bent. For example, at President Bush's Jan. 26 press conference, Gannon asked how Bush could work with lawmakers like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Hillary Clinton, "who seem to have divorced themselves from reality." - Well, it turns out that "Jeff Gannon" is really Jim Guckert, and he was a reporter for an online outfit called "Talon News," which was associated with the online group GOPUSA. com, owned by Texas Republicans. It also turns out that Guckert, in addition to reporting for a phony Web site, has no real journalism training and is a $200-an-hour gay prostitute. He ran numerous Web sites like militaryescortsm4m. com. The photos of Gannon that were displayed on those Web sites left nothing to the imagination about his physical attributes.
|
