Obviously "independent" means "not constrained by reality"
Time for Bush to define 'independent press'
...The Guckert fiasco first surfaced because of a Jan. 26 press conference where President Bush called on Gannon/Guckert, who asked the president how he could work with Senate Democrats when they "seem to have divorced themselves from reality." Bush, like any good politician, stepped into that fat one and answered by giving a short outline of his many policy plans.
What was more interesting than that exchange, however, was the one that immediately preceded it at the same press conference - a back-and-forth with reporters about the administration's paying reporters for positive coverage, as the Education Department did with Armstrong Williams. "There needs to be a nice independent relationship between the White House and the press," the president said.
The question is where Guckert fits into all this. True, the White House didn't pay him for coverage, we assume. But how exactly do he,and pseudo-reporters like him qualify as journalists and help create the "nice independent relationship" the president says he seeks?
Talon News is essentially a "news" mouthpiece for a conservative advocacy website called GOPUSA - that's GOP, as in Grand Old Party. The editor in chief of Talon is president of GOPUSA. On the conservative website Free Republic, Guckert called on others who use the site to demonstrate at Kerry headquarters during the presidential campaign. And many of his stories contained verbatim repeats of White House press releases.
So what? All journalists are biased in some way, say some conservatives. True, journalists are humans, and all humans are biased in some way. But Guckert crossed the line from having a bias to being a propagandist and party activist. Online he was a White House ditto-machine masquerading as reporter, and in the pressroom he was a safe place for Scott McClellan to go when the White House press secretary needed a lifeline during televised briefings.
For the average TV viewer, there's no difference between Guckert and the correspondents of The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, or the paper you're reading now, for that matter. And that's troublesome.
Even after the president's call for an independent relationship with the press, Guckert was back in the White House pressroom. Mr. McClellan even defended Guckert's place there. It was only later, when blogs exposed Guckert's previous Web exploits, that he resigned from Talon News.
It may be time for the White House to define some terms for all of us. What does a "nice independent relationship" with the press really mean? It's easy to see how people like Guckert fit with the "nice" part (at least from the White House perspective); it's the "independent" part that's not clear.
