Paul Farhi of the Washington Post reports that the White House is using "minders", escorts who tag along with reporters at certain official parties or other noteworthy occasions. The "minders" prevent journalists from venturing out of certain designated areas, but they are also there to keep tabs on the journalists' sources:
[T]he escorts weren't there to provide security; all of us had already been through two checkpoints and one metal detector. They weren't there to keep me away from, Heaven forbid, a Democrat or a protester; those folks were kept safely behind rings of fences and concrete barriers. Nor were the escorts there to admonish me for asking a rude question of the partying faithful, or to protect the paying customers from the prying media. ... [T]he minders weren't there to monitor me. They were there to let the guests, my sources on inaugural night, know that any complaint, any unguarded statement, any off-the-reservation political observation, might be noted.
I'm trying to remember where I've seen a precedent for this. Thinking... thinking...
Oh yes! It was in Saddam Hussein's Iraq, where government minders were notorious for dogging Western journalists' steps at every turn. There, too, the system was only partially designed to constrain the scribes; its real intent was to make sure the interviewees never forgot that someone was watching and recording everything they said, and that nothing outside the party line got aired.
I think this speaks for itself. And it certainly reminds me of one of Nietzsche's most famous aphorisms (from Beyond Good and Evil):
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.Posted by Chris at January 31, 2005 01:06 PM | TrackBack