Ah yes, the classic “attack-Gawker.com” pageview grab! A rite of passage of sorts.

They also ran 2 pieces attacking, alternately, Politico’s Mike Allen and the White House press corps for attending an off-the-record 4th of July event at the White House.

As it turns out, Gawker’s outrage is really a fireworks display in a teacup, and their standing to question other reporters’ integrity wouldn’t fill a teaspoon.

A couple of points here. Firstly, regardless of what anyone on Gawker says and regardless of what you might think, having people whose job it is to report on the White House who then go and attend parties thrown by the White House carry the distinct stench of a sycophantic hack with no journalistic or moral ethics whatsoever. That much ought to be plainly obvious to anyone that isn’t consumed by the Washington culture and so reflexively defends it even when the criticism is justified.

Maybe that’s you, maybe not.

What Mike Allen did is no greater an offense than reporters attending the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner – which is more of the same problem – or reporters “embedded” with the McCain campaign last year that were enjoying cookouts at his family home (the one where AT&T and Verizon reportedly setup brand new, portable cell towers just for the McCains) and bringing his wife flowers, laughing while swinging on tire swings like a bunch of adolescent fanboys.

By today’s standards there’s nothing wrong at all with what Allen did, to the contrary his behavior is entirely typical of today’s media. And that’s the problem.

Second, since when does one need “standing” to criticize contemptible behavior? Talk about media elites, you’re placing people like Allen on a pedestal where only his peers have earned the right to criticize him or each other. The public doesn’t exist to serve the media, it exists to serve us, and when it’s not keeping up its end of the bargain the public (which includes Gawker, since media types show so much disdain for blogging that it can’t possibly exist on equal footing or provide equal or greater value) has ever right to hold it and its players accountable.

It’s elitist and personally insulting that you think someone has to earn a certain “standing” in society in order not to be dismissed as so much trash, one of the dirty unwashed masses.

Not to mention that if equal integrity is what one needs in order to criticize a person of Make Allen’s stature, then by your own definition and my own interpretation, virtually anyone with moderate-to-poor English speaking skills is qualified to criticize Politico, a site which wrote nearly a dozen stories about John Edwards’ expensive haircut and other obviously invaluable stories critical to an informed discussion on the problems facing this country both then and now.

Are you serious?

A talking dog has the requisite integrity to take Mike Allen to the house, as if such petty and superficial requirements actually existed or mattered outside of professional punditry.

Does he really have standing to slam journalists for attending an off-the-record event at the White House?

Yes.

While John Cook may have had questionable allegiances during the election, one could hardly argue that his writing whether positive or critical would have had a substantive impact on his access to information, specifically because his time spent as a volunteer (as opposed to a paid campaign staffer) didn’t elicit any. We’re not talking about a high ranking consultant or strategist that had privileged access to the campaign or the candidate that could be yanked away at any time, if say a critical story came out at a bad time.

Therefore it’s hard to see how his apparent status as a volunteer could in turn effect his writing. If he writes a story that the campaign doesn’t like, what are they going to do, ask him to stop volunteering, and if he refuses, what will be the punishment, revoked access to then-Senator Obama that Cook never had in the first place?

You’re trying to compare that to Mike Allen, who has actual sources within the government and believes – as do most people who have corrupted themselves and their profession – that he must keep a balancing act between writing interesting and important news stories and maintaining a friendly personal relationship so that he can keep getting information.

Information that they want him to have, making it mostly useless to begin with, but that’s for another time.

When a person like Allen gets friendly with the people who feed him information, people he becomes dependent upon for his job, then he’s subjecting himself to coercion. Write a bad story about the administration and nobody will talk to you anymore. Write good stories and maybe, just maybe, you’ll be one of the lucky thousands that get to repeat and amplify anonymous government statements uncritically.

And you have a hard time understanding how Mike Allen attending an off-the-record event with the very people he’s supposed to be covering could be seen as being friends with his writing subjects instead of their adversarial media?

Not only is what Allen did clearly sycophantic behavior that compromises his judgment and violates some of the most basic journalistic ethics, the comparison between Allen and Cook is also utterly inane.

Cook didn’t depend on the campaign he was volunteering for for information and unless I’m missing something, I haven’t seen you provide any evidence that he was only volunteering to gain access to the candidate or campaign staff.

It may not have been ideal and perhaps there’s a persuasive argument to be made that Cook’s writing during the campaign was at the very least biased, but that’s an entirely different thing than trading personal access for information and allowing your targets to dictate what you write and how you write it in order to remain friends with them so you can both party like it was a college reunion on your off days.

Such an event, while almost certainly not newsworthy, would provide attendees with a valuable opportunity to develop, or cement, productive relationships.

To the contrary, it’s a worthwhile event to write about precisely because it’s perfectly illustrative of the sickness that infects modern journalism where people believe that the only way to get information from sources is to become their friends, virtually guaranteeing that the only information you’ll get is information favorable to that person’s cause or to the people that they represent. It gives them control over you in that it allows them to bait you with irrelevant, sensationalist garbage or typical propaganda the likes of which you’ll hear in the White House press room every single day, can and will be taken away the instant you stop being loyal to them and to their cause, regardless of what that agenda might be, it’s always going to be there and that will always be the top priority of the kinds of people that want to make buddies out of journalists.

Journalists don’t need to be playing those kinds of games. If a source has information that they believe is important enough to leak to the press, then that information is going to get out no matter who it goes to and it rarely if ever goes to people who like to play footsie with administration officials.

I don’t know what the habits are of James Risen (NSA warrantless wiretapping program) or Dana Priest (CIA black sites and Walter Reed), but somehow I doubt very much that either of them can be found eating cake with administration officials at off-the-record events, places where you’ll find Mike Allen, taking time off from writing about such important stories as John Edwards’ $400 haircut.

However, Cook’s inference wasn’t merely that the press corps was “in the tank” for Obama, but rather that they had sold their journalistic souls for hot dogs and beer.

Cook may have been off the mark, but only in the respect that the press has been well trained over the past 10 years to be in the tank for whoever has power in Washington. It’s not about ideology to them, it’s just about doing whatever they can to get the most superficial access they can get either to people in power in order to feel powerful themselves, in a competition to see who can put the largest number of anonymous government officials in their paper in a single story without caring at all that they are merely repeating – uncritically and in most instances in direct violation of their publication’s own policies regarding anonymous sources – the public position of the current administration.

A position anyone can get just be reading the daily press briefing.

The beer and hotdogs metaphor was weak but ultimately not wrong. These people are selling out their profession to elevate their egos. They aren’t doing hard, admirable work, they are being about as lazy as you can possibly be while still calling yourself a reporter instead of admitting that you’re really nothing more than a glorified stenographer.

Ask yourself where the truly important stories about government wrongdoing come from. Do they come from West Wing staffers and people like Rham Emanuel, or do they come from mid-level analysts in the Department of Defense or CIA? People who see wrongdoing but can’t really do anything to stop it because of where they are on the food chain.

Did Dana Priest get her story on Walter Reed by partying with administration officials that would have liked to keep Walter Reed and the CIA black sites and other things from ever seeing the light of day?

The idea that the administration officials attending these parties are going to leak information valuable to the public rather than hide it at all costs because it will hurt them politically is laughable.

I know if I’d been there, without this stipulation, I would have spent the entire time annoying the crap out of every administration official, political leader, and Foo Fighter at the thing, and nobody would have had any fun.

And you’d never be invited back, either. How terrible that must be, the cool kid not invited back to the party because unlike everyone else in attendance, you actually tried to do your job. That superficial access to people who would rather commit suicide than give you information that might hurt their bosses would see to it that you never got a juicy gossip story to fill your paper’s entertainment pages (rather than hit the news desk) ever again.

Rather than being fed token nuggets in the form of anonymous attacks on political enemies and petty smears that they don’t have the guts to air with their name attached to it, you and your co-workers might actually have to work at getting information for a change.

How awful.

On the other hand, had something truly newsworthy happened at the event, we have a system in place for that, the same as with any off-the-record source or event. But is Mike Allen really supposed to burn the White House in order to report what Dave Grohl puts on his hot dog?

Again, I think you’re intentionally missing the point. Nobody cares if something “newsworthy” happens at a White House party or if the press attending has the balls to do their job or just keep having fun for the evening. What matters is that simply being there – and believing that being there has any value whatsoever to the profession that is supposed to be born skeptical with the belief that everyone is lying to them all the time – is the problem.

I don’t expect there to be anyone at these parties remotely worth talking to on a level that doesn’t involve sports scores or which GOP senator is sleeping with one of his aides instead of his wife (which, I’m sure, is exactly the kind of crap that Mike Allen and company is digging long and hard for.)

I’m not saying that you have to be Jesus R. Murrow in order to be a media critic.

Yes you are, Tommy, that’s exactly what you meant when you condescendingly said that Gawker’s “standing to question other reporters’ integrity wouldn’t fill a teaspoon.” You sat there and lectured John Cook for not having having the same impeccable integrity as the Pulitzer-wielding Mike Allen with an apples-and-oranges comparison of a blogger volunteering for a campaign with no substantive access to that campaign that anyone not volunteering would have, and a supposed real life, honest to God journalist partying and playing friends with the very people he is expected to cover at an event that he would never be invited back to again if his friends suddenly don’t find his website quite so useful anymore.

If you’re going to slam White House reporters for allegedly falling down on the job, you ought to first demonstrate an understanding of what that job is.

Call me crazy but I think the real problem here is that Cook wrote about what the job is supposed to be while all you and Allen are concerned about is what that job has devolved into. Journalists shouldn’t be partying with the people they are supposed to be covering anymore than judges should be partying with people involved in a case they are overseeing.

Since you were the first to invoke Murrow, tell me this: do you think you’d have seen Murrow laughing and eating cake with McCarthy?

Not so much, no.

And just to be clear about this, “Pulitzer-wielding Mike Allen” was a joke that I hope everyone got. But for those who need things like this to be explained to you, there it is.