The corporate media continue to pretend that they don't know what the issue is when it comes to Jeff Gannon. Maybe it's that bloggers are poking into private lives. Maybe it's that it's "dangerous for the White House to get into the business of defining who is and is not a member of the press corps," as this recent
LA Times article suggested.
But the obvious point is that the White House has been exposed in infiltrating the press. This used to get them upset.
When the CIA did it, official media organizations object loudly, as this American Society of Newspaper Editors statement makes clear:
The American Society of Newspaper Editors strongly objects to your dangerous decision to allow intelligence officers to pose as journalists, and to recruit reporters to serve as informers.
Both practices are contrary to the principle of an independent American press, and they put the lives of our foreign correspondents at serious risk.
There can be no exceptions - even under what you or others in the security community might feel are extraordinarily rare circumstances.
A special distinction of the American system is the complete separation of the roles of the government and the press.
Of course, this statement was issued in 1996, when Clinton was in office. Now "the complete separation of the roles of the government and the press" seems to be a much harder concept for the press to grasp. When the executive branch of the government conspires to allow James Guckert to pose as a White House journalist under the name of Jeff Gannon, what has happened to "the complete separation of the roles of government and the press?"
Why won't the press see what is so clearly staring them in the face? We must conclude that it is because they have already been thoroughly infiltrated and corrupted.