Unofficial Officials, Leaks and Controlling The News Cycle

By Cernig

Well, the Obama administration has started off with one hard lesson learned from Bush and Clinton - leak early, leak often, make your unofficial officials indispensabe to the mainstream news process and throughout your term you'll be able to control the narrative. The big-ticket newsies will be too scared of losing their precious access to be able to consider independent thought or investigative journalsim that might actually turn up unwelcome surprises.

As one prominent investigative reporter, who actually does his own spadework instead of simply regurgitating unofficially official spin wholesale, told me back in August for a previous post on the phenomenon of "stenography for access":

Explicit or implicit bargains between sources and journalists is an important dynamic at work in the pattern of uncritical reporting of the official line. Of course the belief of some journalists that they must somehow earn the trust of official sources by showing that they can be cooperative reflects the assumption that they are both, in some sense, on the same team. That assumption is surely the ideological basis for the phenomenon.

Exploiting that dynamic is an effective tactic, one that Helen Thomas charted the ascendancy of in her book Watchdogs of Democracy, and one that mostly explains why the MSM so faithfully transcribed every story the Bush administration had to tell. Of course, the alternative is an administration shut up like a clam which would force the newsies to keep using their current crop of insiders - and right now would enable the neocon Right to keep on keeping on with controlling all transmissions. So Obama's right from his own point of view to take the same highly successful tack as his predecessors, which doesn't make it any less palatable for those of us who would prefer that reporters earning big bucks earned their paychecks the old-fashioned way instead of being stenographers for the current administration.