By declining to hear the appeal of a Pennsylvania publisher last week, the Supreme Court let stand a ruling that may allow a newspaper to be held liable for defamation simply for reporting the news.

In 1995, the Daily Local News in West Chester, PA., published an account of borough Councilman William T. Glenn Sr. as “strongly implying” that council president James B. Norton III and Mayor Alan M. Wolfe were “queers and child molesters.” Norton and Wolfe denied the charges and filed suit against Glenn for defamation. The suit also named the Daily Local who had merely reported factually that the exchange took place and included Norton’s and Wolfe’s denials.

After finding that Glenn had defamed Norton and Wolfe and awarding them damages, the jury found that the Daily Local was not liable, partly due to the doctrine of neutral reportage. That doctrine permits recounting a public figure’s comments as long as they are reported neutrally and accurately. In other words, if the Mayor calls the Governor a lush, the newspaper can report what the Mayor said without being responsible for his veracity. However, the jury’s verdict with regard to the paper was reversed on appeal and the lawsuit against it reinstated. Now the paper must defend itself on the grounds that it had exercised no actual malice.

The neutral reportage privilege is a perfectly reasonable first amendment protection for the media when it is informing the public about events that actually occur. The public should have the right to assess facts that are fairly presented. They also should have the right to be fully informed about public figures who make outrageous and untruthful public statements. The appellate court, in finding that the neutral reportage privilege does not exist in Pennsylvania or federal law, puts the press in the position of being unable to report events in the news if the events happen to contain potentially defamatory charges. These events, or as I like to call them, political campaigns, would have to forego almost all media coverage. Maybe this isn’t such a bad thing after all.

As a consequence of the Supreme Court’s refusal to take up the case, we are left with the following scenario from the example above: The press could not report what the Mayor said without first ascertaining that the Governor is, indeed, a lush. If the Governor is a teetotaler, the press could not report the exchange at all without exposing it self to a possible lawsuit. The public would then never hear from the press how the Mayor made an ass of himself. So much for a free press.

The Gannon Chronicles, while revealing in many senses of the word, may be pointing the way to an even richer treasure. Over the past few months, the Republican press gaggle has been inflicting itself with black eyes, bruised ribs and multiple compound fractures of the ethics bone. One after another, wingnut weebles have been wobbled, but the damn things just won’t fall down. The list is long and disturbing:

• HHS distributes “news” videos to TV stations to be aired without disclosing their source or that the “anchors” were actually actors.
• Bill Bennett, author of “The Book of Virtues” is a compulsive gambler.
• Fox reporter, Carl Cameron, whose sister worked for the Bush campaign, publishes false Kerry story at Foxnews.com
• Monica Crowley, former Fox Analyst, now co-hosting her own show on MSNBC, is outted as a plagiarist.
• Rush Limbaugh is a drug addict.
• Armstrong Williams, and others, were paid by the DoE to promulgate propaganda.
• Bill O’Reilly settles an allegation of sexual harrassment.
• And, of course, JimmyJeff Gangucnonkert.

Lest we forget, there were also fabricated stories of war heroes Jessica Lynch (who did not fight till the last bullet) and Pat Tillman (who was actually killed by friendly fire). I’m sure I’ve left some out, but clearly our leaders have been playing us for chumps.

You would think the weight of this mass of embarrassments would cause some dinghy in this fleet to sink. But, what was that old saying: A right-wing tide lifts all restrictions on theo-con morality so they can all go out and buy more boats.

There must be more examples of this kind of misbehavior. Just the fact that those that have been discovered were so amateurishly executed and easy to find tells me that their designers were none too bright and raises the likelyhood that we have just scraped the surface. What do you suppose we could learn by investigating Sean Hannity with the zeal we’ve employed on Gannon? What about Ann Coulter; Jim Pinkerton; Jonah Goldberg; Fred Barnes; Michael Reagan; Laura Ingraham? I truly believe that if we shake these trees there will be snakes falling out and we’ll have all the apples we can eat. If there is one thing we’ve learned about these moralizing twits, it’s that they have no morals.

But the big picture here is that there has to be a way to assert some consequences on those responsible for these compounding failures. I think the way to do that is to try to make an issue of the fact these are not isolated infractions. While the corporate media has done an atrocious job of reporting on these singular events, there has been some light squeaking through. Now its time to flood the stage. How can the media refrain from commenting on the fact that all of these individual pieces form a picture of a brazenly corrupt administration that is transparently manipulating the press and the public. And doing it very badly (except for the fact that its working). It may be difficult to recruit the press into this because doing so will expose them for their myopic timidity. On the other hand, they are also victims of the manipulation and should be angry enough to want some payback. More likely, we could frighten them into participating because not doing so will result in them being shown up again by the bloggers, and you know they’re getting tired of that.

So, how many scandals does it take before the media gets its head out of its ass (don’t want to get hit with one of those new indecency fines). This isn’t a bunch of lone gunmen. Its a friggin crime spree!

The contingent of reporters that cover the President are presumed to be professionals that have earned their access through years of journalistic acheivement. Right. And if ever a wonderful Wiz there was The Wizard of Oz is one because…..oh nevermind.

The White House press corpse was recently infiltrated by a right-wing mole whose resume boasted of a weekend seminar at the conservative Leadership Institute. His name appeared to be Jeff Gannon but was later discovered to be James “JD” Guckert.

Gannon (as I’ll call him for convenience), has been attending White House briefings for about a year, asking questions that were loaded to the max. For example:

“…You’ve said you’re going to reach out to [Senate Democrats]. How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?”

“Is this another piece of evidence showing the direct terror ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda?”

“Doesn’t Joe Wilson owe the President and America an apology for his deception and his own intelligence failure?”

“Since there have been so many questions about what the President was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda, denouncing America’s racist war in Vietnam? Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else’s medals at the White House to protest a war America was still fighting?”

So who is Jeff Gannon? This reporter was called upon frequently by the President’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, and even by the President himself at his January 20, news conference. They called on him by name and must have known that he could be counted on to lob a softball. He represented Talon News, a conservative website that is run by Bobby Eberle. Eberle is also a Republican operative in Texas and the CEO of GOPUSA. As Talon’s correspondant, Gannon was denied capital hill press credentials when Talon could not prove that it had advertisers or paid circulation. But Gannon did manage to get accredited at the White House.

Gannon is not an unknown quantity in this administration. His name appeared on a list of people the FBI wants to question in regard to the Valerie Plame affair (Plame is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson. Her status as a CIA operative was unlawfully disclosed in news reports by Robert Novak and others, alledgedly to punish Wilson for statements he made that were critical of the administration). The FBI’s interest in Gannon was connected to his possession of a classified CIA memo that addressed Wilson’s assignment to Niger. How did he get that memo and why was he allowed to use it to malign Wilson with impunity?

This story gets more bizarre from here. Gannon is also the owner of a number of provacative web site domains: Hotmilitary-stud.com, Militaryescorts.com andMilitaryescortsm4m.com. This recent revelation seems to have prompted the retirement of Gannon and his jeffgannon.com. Talon News has deleted all its stories by Gannon, as well as his bio. The uncreating of Jeff Gannon is in progress.

Its interesting that none of what we know about any of this was uncovered by the corporate media. The investigations and reporting on this was done almost entirely by enterprising and intrepid bloggers like those at DailyKos.com and MediaMatters.org.

From an administration that has already been exposed for having paid reporters to hawk its propaganda (Armstrong Williams, et al), for distributing videos to TV stations without disclosing the source or that the reporters in them were actually actors, what can we conclude from all of this? Is Jeff Gannon a creation of the White House designed to put pro-Bush sound bites into the media? Was he operating covertly to punish White House enemies? New York representative Louise Slaughter is calling for an investigation. If we are ever to get answers to these questions, let’s hope we get one.

MSNBC is said to be preparing a new program that will feature the anchoring duo of Ron Reagan, Jr. and Monica Crowley. Crowley is a former foreign policy aide to Richard Nixon and comes to MSNBC following a stint as a Fox News political analyst.

Over the years she has also been busy writing books and magazine and newspaper articles, often about Nixon. The only problem is that her authorship, at least on one occasion, appears not to be her own work. The filching was reported at the time by Timothy Noah for Slate.

In August of 1999, Crowley wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal commemorating the 25th anniversary of Nixon’s resignation. Four days after the article ran, the paper published the following:

“There are striking similarities in phraseology between “The Day Richard Nixon Said Goodbye,” an editorial feature Monday by Monica Crowley, and a 1988 article by Paul Johnson in Commentary magazine … Had we known of the parallels, we would not have published the article.”

The similarities are indeed striking:

From Johnson’s “In Praise of Richard Nixon,” Commentary, October 1988:
“There was none of the personal corruption which had marked the rule of Lyndon Johnson, let alone the gross immoralities and security risks of John F. Kennedy’s White House.”

From Crowley’s “The Day Nixon Said Goodbye,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 1999:
“There was none of the personal corruption that had marked the rule of Lyndon Johnson or the base immoralities and outrageous security risks of the Kennedy and Clinton White Houses.”

Johnson:
“Nixon … consistently underestimated the unscrupulousness of his media enemies and their willingness to sacrifice the national interest in the pursuit of their institutional vendetta.”

Crowley:
“Nixon, though always suspicious of his political enemies, consistently underestimated their ruthlessness and willingness to sacrifice the national interest in the pursuit of their institutional vendetta.”

Johnson:
“So great was the inequity of Nixon’s downfall that future historians may well conclude he would have been justified in allowing events to take their course and in subjecting the nation to the prolonged paralysis of a public impeachment, which at least would have given him the opportunity to defend himself by due process of law. But once again his patriotism took precedence over his self-interest …”

Crowley:
“Given the inequity of Nixon’s downfall, historians may yet determine that he would have been justified in allowing events to take their course and subjecting the country to a prolonged process of impeachment, which would have given him the chance to defend himself by due process of law. His allegiance to the country, however, overrode his political self-interest.”

Johnson:
Characterizes the 1960 election as “one of the most corrupt elections of modern times.”

Crowley:
Characterizes the 1960 election as “one of the most corrupt elections of modern times.”

[This assertion, unlike the others, has some merit, and it’s possible the two arrived at the phrase independent of one another; but given the other examples cited here, that likelihood is not great.]

Johnson:
“By a curious paradox Richard Nixon was one of the very few people who emerged from the Watergate affair with credit.”

Crowley:
“Ironically, Nixon was one of the few people who emerged from Watergate with credit …”

[Johnson is British, Crowley American; why would she, on her own, use a Britishism like “with credit”?]

Slate reports that this rather blatant plagiarism was not widely disseminated at the time. Certainly Fox’s journalistic standards would not preclude the hiring of such an ethically-challenged individual, and maybe MSNBC’s standards are no better. But some attempt should be made to disseminate this story now and force MSNBC to defend (or even articulate) their standards.

Reagan has paid his dues at MSNBC and should not have to share this program with an avowedly right-wing hack who lacks the requisite principles for the job. Furthermore, if the network is seeking to achieve ideological balance, the last thing they need is a conservative analyst from Fox. Reagan should anchor the program himself or be paired with another independent-minded former Republican, Arianna Huffington.

Crowley needs to be challenged. It is unseemly for news professionals to be promoted with unexamined issues like this in their past. And it is dereliction on the part of the network (and news consumers, i.e. us) to ignore such a violations of the integrity of authorship. Ms. Crowley and/or the network should be required to answer this allegation and we should put their feet to the fire.