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The power of the press pass

By MICHAEL BOYLAN

I have a love/hate relationship with my press pass. I love that it gets me in to all of the events that I am expected to cover for free, but I hate that it has my picture on it. I never look good in pictures. Check out the mug at the top of this column. It’s not exactly a Glamour Shot.

I also hate that one time I forgot my press pass was still in the pocket of my jeans and it got washed and crinkled and I really hate the fact that it has an expiration date. It is no problem to get it renewed but recently I forgot that it had expired and it caused a bit of a stir.

Most people never even look at it that closely. They see “Press” in big letters at the top of it, look at my picture on it and then look at me. I’m usually smiling and nodding, uttering, “The Citizen,” and starting to walk on by.

This process didn’t fly at the region 4-AAAAA basketball championships at Mundy’s Mill. The lady at the table started by scrunching up her nose at the condition of the pass.

“What do we have here,” she asked in a bit of a sneer. She then gestured for me to hand it over. OK, fine. No problem. I hand it over for her to study and she flips it over. Again, no big deal, she’ll look at the signature of my boss and let me on through.

“It’s expired,” she said, rather triumphantly. What?! Expired?!

“Yeah, I don’t know why we even put expiration dates on our passes,” I said, trying to sound cool. “I still work for the paper.”

“Which paper?” “The Citizen.” It says it right on the front. What was she trying to do, trap me like the people at the airport? What was coming next, “When has this pass been out of your control or who besides you has packed your camera bag?”

Now, I’m starting to freak out a bit. Tip-off for the girls game is a few minutes away and I am in big, big trouble if I don’t get pictures and the story.

“I have a business card, if you want.”

She stated that, yes, she would like a business card.

“Where is this paper?”

“Right down the road. By Quizno’s.”

I think at this point I am starting to sweat.

“Ma’am. I only have a dollar on me.”

“Oh, so we’ve really got you over a barrel, don’t we?”

She did. If she refused to accept my pass, I would be six dollars shy of the admission fee. I wanted to tell her that I wouldn’t even be there if I didn’t have to be, but this situation needed to be destabilized. It did not need me to add fuel to the fire.

She finally relented, allowing me in to the game. I got my pass renewed the following Monday and thankfully it doesn’t expire for two more years.

Now, why is the press table at a high school basketball game more scrutinizing than the White House?

I’m sure you’ve all heard about the guy, Jeff Gannon aka James Dale Guckert, who got press credentials to the White House for his on-line news service. Of course, now it comes out that he got credentials before his site was up, was called on to ask softball, party-friendly questions by the President and his spokesmen, operated under an alias and, oh yeah, he was a gay escort in the Washington, D.C. area.

Just think of how big this story would be if the Clinton White House had a male prostitute lobbing easy questions to the President. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and the rest of the right wing talk radio people would drill it into the ground for years. Chances are, you’ve only heard a brief mention of this, if at all.

Regardless, how can someone in this day and age of “elevated terror alerts” get into the White House and get that close to a President without security and staff having full knowledge of who he really is and what he really does? Why was he allowed into briefings before his Internet news site was registered and on-line?

Gannon’s credential request to cover Congress was turned down. The Standing Committee of Correspondents denied his request because his organization did not meet the criteria for credentials. It satisfied the White House, though, enough that they could call on him to ask questions like how the President could work with Democrats who were “divorced from reality.”

One would assume that anybody who gets in the White House undergoes a fairly thorough background check. It’s surprising that they didn’t find out about his naked pictures on Web sites advertising his services to be a male escort.

Maybe he just slipped on by, but the whole thing looks shady. If members of the media weren’t a little alarmed at his questions and never started digging, would he still be asking questions on a Friday and dating for cash on the weekends?

The fact that he is an escort is bad enough because prostitution is illegal, but the fact that he just slid on through seems to show that the administration knew more than they let on and allowed it to continue so that they had someone they could count on to ask party-friendly questions.

Maybe the White House should hire that Mom from Mundy’s Mill. She’d get to the bottom of this situation.