White House to discipline faux Faux News staffers

The Bush administration says it will take disciplinary action against two government employees who impersonated members of the news media. The two identified themselves falsely as employees of a FOX News TV affiliate. As noted here last week, this was in advance of a visit by President Bush to Biloxi, Mississippi.

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.

Today, Reuters reports the government employees, whom the White House will not identify, will be subject to disciplinary action.

White House spokesman Ken Lisaius was quoted as saying, "This incident has been brought to our attention, and this is clearly not appropriate, nor is it part of our standard operating procedures. The individuals will be verbally reprimanded."

A Secret Service spokesman told the newspaper the people involved were not Secret Service officials.

Asked to identify where they worked, White House spokeswoman Jeanie Mamo said she would not go beyond the statement Lisaius gave to the Post.

That sounds about right for this mob. Two government employees misrepresent themselves as members of the news media and all they are in for is a stern talking-to.

Never mind the fate facing the next journalist who is taken into custody overseas and accused of being a government agent. We know for certain now that government agents have, in fact, misrepresented themselves as journalists. You think outlaw foreign governments or militias will hesitate to use torture to get them to confess?

And, what about FOX "News?" What explains their silence on this issue? If agents of the Bush administration had identified themselves as New York Times reporters or producers from ABC News, one imagines that the lawsuits would be flying already.

Of course, when you're essentially a quasi-governmental entity to begin with, I guess it's no big deal to have the administration hijack your corporate identity for its own use.