A Tissue of Lies

There are a whole number of levels and angles by which the Jeff Gannon debacle shocks, titillates and alarms. This so-called White House reporter was recently exposed and discredited for many things, among the least operating with a pseudonym. Jeff Gannon is really James Gucket. This self-proclaimed right winger, it turns out, has a private life that exemplified anything but.

Of course, it's easiest to see the obvious self-loathing that attends the type of person whose public posturing involves an angry repudiation of his own private behavior. All too common. One doesn't know whether to pity such a person or to vilify his hypocrisy, perhaps both. A major problem is always the collateral damage caused by such cases, the way the person's internal self-hatred translates into harm inflicted on others.

Another feature is the way in which this kind of thing, perceived by the perpetrator as a kind of defense mechanism against real or imagined threats, transfers into a more general behavior based on deceit and double standards. After all, cloaking a private life with a public one that stridently decries it constitutes a profound form of lying. Cultivating an internal mental framework rooted in a hysterical lie, such a person develops a predisposition to lie about many things. Thus was Guckert able to lie himself into the White House, using a pseudonym and probably a lot more.

Ultimately, it’s all about lying.

Nobody has associated this case with the regrettable Stephen Glass of the New Republic, whose case was so brilliantly documented in the film, “Shattered Glass.”

His was a case of lies piled upon lies, like layers of an onion, each justified to his own mind as desperate acts of self-defense. But his entire role as a young reporter at the New Republic was nothing more than, as they say, “a tissue of lies.” In the Guckert case, the lying doesn't stop with him. He is merely one liar among many of his cohorts, a pyramid of co-conspiring liars in fact, not the least of which is the president, himself.

After all, the very fact that this man was allowed to walk through the gates and past the layers of guards into the White House under false pretenses, using a pseudonym - suggesting that all the arduous Secret Service efforts to protect the president with extraordinary security measures were defaulted in this case (and how many others we don't know about?) - indicates that the White House wanted him there. There can little doubt that the Republican high rollers who sponsored Guckert’s right wing political web site activities arranged the free pass for access. No questions asked. No doubt that Guckert rewarded his patrons and the White House by fulfilling his assigned role as a barely-disguised cheer leader for Bush and partisan shill sitting among the White House press corps.

The White House press office and Scott McClellan knew how to use Guckert, masquerading as a journalist just as he masqueraded as straight and anti-gay, just has he masqueraded with a false name. McClellan knew how to exploit this bundle of lies by deferring to Guckert repeatedly during daily briefings for the proverbial softball questions, for the opportunities to repel and deflect questions from real journalists. This all leads right to the top, as we all saw on national television when Bush, himself, connected directly with Guckert by giving him the floor at a major East Room press conference.

It was an arrangement rooted in lies, top to bottom, that brought the president of the United States into direct collusion with a lying male prostitute on national TV.

While the effort of politicians to manipulate the press goes back at least as far as the invention of moveable type, attempts to reinvent the press in one's own political image probably go way back, too. It's always unscrupulous, but why should that stop anyone? In recent times, of course, we’ve seen the rise of Fox News, one of the best attempts yet at packaging propaganda as news and misleading an entire nation. Then there are the more subtle controls over the mainstream media by boards of directors of parent companies with vested interests in certain political outcomes. Can any honest journalist working for any such organization deny that, ultimately, the spin on the news he or she attempts to report will not be so influenced?

Normally, those at the top of corporate media giants are constrained by something called “credibility.” For their news products to be credible, their journalists must be allowed a relatively free rein to call it as they see it.

But the value of credibility seems, ultimately, to be what's at stake here. As credibility matters less and less, the public has no safeguards to distinguish truth from fiction, or, as in the Bush-to-Guckert case, outright lying.

Nicholas Benton may be emailed at nfbenton@fcnp.com