Raw Story reports that the National Press Club (NPC) is again defending its panel discussion, this time with yet another rationale. You gotta hand it to the mainstream media running the Press Club, they've got more excuses explaining their handling of this panel than Gannon has, well, previous professions.
According to Roll Call, where there's going to be a story tomorrow:
National Press Club officials, reports Akers, "insist they're going to sharply question Gannon about how he wound up covering the Bush White House with no prior journalism experience."Well, with all due respect Mike, we wish that were true, but recent experience suggests otherwise.
"I don't think John Aravosis is the only person in the world who's capable of criticizing Jeff Gannon," Mike Madden, a reporter with Gannett News Service who will moderate Friday's panel discussion told Akers.
We watched, first hand, the downright crappy and unprofessional job most of the mainstream media has done handling the GannonGuckert story to date. Other than a few glaring exceptions, like E&P, Salon.com, Anderson Cooper, Mo Dowd and Frank Rich, most of the mainstream media refused to cover the story, and when they did cover it, it was trivialized as gossip and they got the facts wrong. Worse yet, the msm let GannonGuckert spout off wildly contradictory facts each and every time he speaks, yet barely any of you call him on it. So pardon the blogosphere for worrying that the mainstream media is going to do what it has always done when confronting this story - duck and cover.
But there's more from Roll Call:
The Press Club's president said he planned to ask Gannon why he considered himself a journalist. "He should answer that question. The alternative is to censor somebody. We believe in free speech and tough questions," Dunham said.Yeah, uh huh. Asking GG why he considers himself a journalist is not a "tough question." Following up and catching him in his inconsistencies and half truths, knowing what he's said at previous appearances and catching him changing his story and making him explain why, now THAT would constitute tough questioning. But hope springs eternal.
And as for this new-found National Press Club love of free speech and abhorence of censorship, funny the NPC wasn't so outraged when Jayson Blair wasn't present at two NPC panels about his saga, and we hear Stephen Glass wasn't exactly invited to talk at his panel either. But those plagiarizing fake reporters weren't also high-priced man-whores, so perhaps their lack of titillating-entertainment-value places them lower on the free speech totem pole.
Not to mention, if the National Press Club is such a fan of free speech, then why is the only key player in the GannonGuckert affair who isn't invited to the panel discussion the blogs who actually broke the story and followed it doggedly for two months, trying in vain to get the mainstream media to cover the very aspect of the story the NPC is debating on Friday?
Oh, but that would require a foolish consistency on the part of the National Press Club. I mean, you can't expect the National Press Club to give free speech rights to BOTH sides of a story. I mean, that would be, um, fair and balanced. And in the new journalism of today, the august journalism the National Press Club appears to now embrace, if you don't write about ass-fucking, or charge $200 an hour for it, your free speech rights are checked at the door, and your credit for breaking a story goes down the censorship memory hole.
Oh wait. I just wrote about ass-fucking. Maybe my invitation is now on the way.
