National Press Club refuses to balance GannonGuckert panel discussion

The National Press Club's latest buffoonery? Adding another blogger, who has nothing to do with the GannonGuckert controversy, to panel and someone from USA Today. Uh, ok. That's nice. Maybe they'll add the Easter Bunny too, since it would have about as much relevance to our concerns as the folks they're adding now.

We stated, quite clearly, that a panel with GannonGuckert about GannonGuckert should have someone on it who was a key player and key blogger dealing with GannonGuckert and who has the opposite point of view of GannonGuckert. That could involve someone from DailyKos, Atrios, World O Crap, AMERICAblog, Media Matters, and I'm sure other blogs that now slip my mind who were all heavily involved in the breaking and covering the controversy.

Why do we ask this? Because, quite clearly, either GannonGuckert is on the panel to talk about his case or he shouldn't be there at all. If he's NOT there to talk about his case and how it relates to blogging and the media, then is he there simply because he's an expert on blogging? No, because he's not a blogger.


(This is a photo from his male escort Web site.)

Is he there as a journalist expert on topics not involving his controversy? No, because he's no such expert, and questionably not even a journalist. He's clearly there to represent his point of view on his controversy. And the National Press Club is clearly not interesting in having anybody represent the other side of this controversy, or they'd have invited someone key to the other side.

Imagine a hypothetical scenario in which the National Press Club has a panel about the 2004 presidential election. They invite the Bush folks, a bunch of journalists and bloggers who have nothing to do with the election, and then they refuse to invite the Kerry folks. The Press Club would have us believe this is okay since the Bush folks, or the unrelated bloggers and journalists would represent the Kerry point of view. The Press Club might even tell us "we're not having the panel to debate WHO SHOULD HAVE WON the 2004 election, we're simply doing it to discuss lots of issues surrounding the election, so it doesn't matter if we have both sides." Right, and in discussing the 2004 election you thought the Bush point of view and the middleman's point of view were both relevant, but didn't think it would be relevant to invite someone representing, and having insight on, the other side of the very issue the entire panel is about.

This isn't about me. They could have invited anyone from any of the blogs I mentioned above - all blogs that were key to covering the GannonGuckert story. Instead, they didn't invite a soul. And to add insult to injury, they actually chose today to invite another blogger to the event - showing that they HAD space to invite someone actually relevant to the GannonGuckert story, they had space to rectify the glaring bias of their panel - but they chose not to.

But hey, the mainstream media never was interested in covering the GannonGuckert story as news, so is it any surprise that they're still not willing to give the story a fair shake now? And they wonder why we don't like them.

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