International ignorance

It's terribly frustrating the way the mainstream Irish media often refuse to pick up on stories in more obscure publications that may not share their top-class journalistic values. Publications like Newsweek, for example.

Newsweek, you see, thinks it's a pretty big deal that the US is involved in kidnapping "terror suspects" and shuttling them around the world, perhaps to be tortured. This week's edition of the slightly reputable American News magazine includes an exposé focussing on a CIA Boeing 737 that's been involved in such "extraordinary renditions" (joining the Gulfstream V that has already been covered well by Village, and not so well by others in Ireland). Newsweek includes information about its travels, with flight plans including a certain Shannon Airport.

And Irish hacks, usually eager to exploit any local angle from such an international story, just yawn and decide not to provide grist to the mill for those wacky Shannon protesters who refuse to get the war off their brains. Don't those crusties realise that the story is just so dead?

In fairness, many of those hacks have clearly been too busy rejoicing in the healing of the "terrible division" (says RTÉ's Tony Connelly, with real emotion) between the US and some European allies heralded by George Bush's visit. The insistent past-tensing of the Iraq war is a crucial part of that celebratory rhetoric.

All journalists covering a particular beat run the risk of being institutionalised – not so much "locked up" as locked-in to the collective mentalities of those they deal with: politicians, cops, the military, whoever. But few institutions seem to be as adept at laying a deadening hand on a journalist's independence-of-mind as those of the European Union.

You don't have to be in Brussels or Strasbourg to show some of the symptoms of EU institutionalisation. Before the reports of Bushy reconciliation started rolling in, we were treated to celebratory stories about a low-turnout, non-binding referendum in Spain on the EU constitution. On Morning Ireland Fiona Forde rationalised the poor voting numbers: it was the third Spanish polling-day in a year. Well, indeed, getting out to vote three times in a year is an awfully big ask – this democracy business is a hard old station.

Which is worse: journalists who become institutional insiders, or institutional insiders who pretend to be journalists?

American media-hounds are sure it's the latter, and so are very hot and bothered about Jeff Gannon (real name: James Guckert), a Republican activist who scored a coveted White House press pass on the basis of his work for an absurd right-wing website called Talon News. He was "outed" because at a January press conference he asked President Bush a question that was ludicrously ass-kissing even by the standards of the Washington press corps, and a few liberals looked into him.

And then he got outed again, as the wondrous research tool that is Google yielded up more of Gannon's – ahem – interests. It emerged that Gannon/Guckert is a gay "escort" as well as a paid cut-and-paster of government press releases. Gay commentator Justin Raimondo of antiwar.com aptly describes him as a "media whore", and reckons there is more to learn about his connections to the administration's upper echelons.

While we wait for all that, there is great amusement to be taken from the Bush brigades, getting uppity about these dreadful homophobic intrusions into people's private lives. There oughta be a law, really.