David Sirota is fighting for access on Capitol Hill—and his fight is one that should concern us all. He wants press credentials through his work with In These Times. He’s having trouble getting them (click on the link above and get his own words on what’s going on).
What’s interesting to me is that this incident is pointing out quite graphically what I see as one of the greatest problems faced by mainstream journalism today—and, specifically, how the journalists aren’t facing it.
In one of the stories on the controversy, Mary Ann Akers of The Washington Post cites Fred Barnes as saying "he and Sirota are in a different league professionally."
Different league?
In April of 2005, a blogger who uses the name "Pachacutec" and I attended a panel discussion at the National Press Club in Washington, DC entitled "Who Is a Journalist?" We attended because Jeff Gannon, the notorious faux reporter and ex-"escort," was to be one of the panelists (click here for my ePluribus Media story on dKos about it, here for a piece on it on my own blog, and here for Pachacutec’s take on it and on the problems with Washington journalism). Other panelists were bloggers Garrett Graff, Matt Yglesias, and Ana Marie Cox along with "mainstream" journalists Rick Dunham, John Stanton, and Julie Hirschfeld Davis—who serves on the credentialling committee for journalists at the Capitol (or did, she may not still be on the committee), a committee that had turned Gannon down, because his Talon News wasn’t considered a "real" journalistic entity. It was because he had been turned down on the Hill that Gannon couldn’t get more than a day pass at the White House (though he got day passes again and again, for well over a year).
Now, Gannon may have been a fraud, but Sirota is not, and neither is In These Times. To give Barnes credit, he recognizes this, even if the credentialling committee does not: "I think their rules shouldn't be so cramped that they can't make accommodations for people like Sirota. Even if he is an activist. In this case, he's a journalist writing a book." Make accommodations?
It should be Sirota’s right.
The odd thing about the panel I attended was that, except for Gannon, everyone on it was a member of the "club" of DC journalism—even the bloggers. Everyone on the panel was either a child of a journalist, married to a journalist, a journalist himself or herself, or had gone to Harvard. This was the "league" that Barnes feels he belongs to—and that Sirota doesn’t, that I don’t, that Parachutec doesn’t (read his article linked above—it addresses this issue quite squarely). Oh, and that Gannon doesn't (the problem wasn't that he didn't deserve access, but that he got it fraudulently).
Without thinking about it, without ever realizing they were doing it, the members of this "league" have re-written the First Amendment to the Constitution, making it into justification for an elite called "the press." The First Amendment reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
At the time it was composed, there was no separate entity called "the press" (the concept of the "fourth estate" was still decades in the future—see my book The Rise of the Blogosphere when it comes out in April for more on this). The press, as then seen, was an extension of the people, particularly through their political parties, which were organized in large part around their newspapers.
Again, "freedom of the press" was not a right given to a particular institution, but to the people.
By appropriating that right, American news media have limited it for the rest of us. What has happened to David Sirota (or even to Jeff Gannon, fraud or not) points this out most graphically.
No, there isn’t room in the White House or on Capitol Hill for access by all who want it all the time, but something needs to be done to remove control of access from the "league," from the small group of professional insiders who control so much of the reporting from our nation’s capital. Something needs to be done to free it up once again—for the people.
Oh yes--I almost forgot--and for the journalists. If they keep going the way they have been, sealing themselves off from the rest of us, seeing themselves as somehow different and better, they are going to continue down the path to irrelevancy they started on long before Stephen Colbert called them out for it.