Government agents posed as FOX News producers

A homeowner in Biloxi, Mississippi was visited by two men who identified themselves as staffers from a FOX "News" affiliate station. They turned out to be an advance team for President Bush.

Recounting the pre-visit days for WLOX and the Sun Herald, Jerry Akins, who received Bush, mentioned that on the Friday before Bush arrived, two men approached him identifying themselves as members of the media.

He said the men told him they were with Fox News out of Houston, Texas, and were on a "scouting mission" for a story on new construction. They took pictures inside Akins' house, which is under construction and looked up and down the road in the neighborhood.

Akins said he didn't think anything more about them partly because visits from strangers increased exponentially as government agents and Secret Service arrived that Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday before the March 8 visit. But after the president left Akins' home, the two men again approached Akins and let him know they were not media after all, but were with the governmental entourage.

Akins said the two showed him blue porcelain lapel pins that contained the Presidential seal and another government official confirmed the two were with the government entourage and not the media. Akins assumed they were Secret Service agents.

But a spokesman for Secret Service, under Homeland Security, said posing as a journalist is not something the agents typically do. He did suggest they might have been with the White House staff or a branch of the military, based on the description of the pins.

Fox News had no comment.

The Sun-Herald quotes a media ethics expert from the Poynter Institute who says such episodes can erode the public's trust in the news media.

I am more intrigued by the notion that, if given a choice, government agents will identify themselves with FOX "News" rather than any other media outlet. One imagines that if they identified themselves without permission as NPR producers or as Washington Post reporters, those two institutions might have quite a lot to say about it. They might say it in a lawsuit, as a matter of fact.

FOX "News," on the other hand, seems perfectly okay with having agents of the government co-opt its professional identity for official business. Or, at least, if it bothers them, they aren't saying so.