Hullabaloo’s Digby has a reference to an earlier post of mine quoting Jonathon Salant’s remark about bloggers not being excluded from the festivities at the National Press Club’s discussion of “Who is a Journalist,” featuring veteran White House reporter Jeff Gannon, despite a press club restriction of the audience to “NPC members and credentialed journalists only.”

If you don’t already know what’s been going on, the press club have adopted what could fairly be described as a patriarchal attitude toward the idea that upstart bloggers, aside from the intriguingly potty-mouthed Wonkette, should have a role as panelists involving a story that for all practical purposes was pursued and broken exclusively by bloggers, John Aravosis in particular.

I told John I think he’s been cast, on behalf of us all, in the role of the coke bottle in “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” Bloggers, on the other hand, have cast the press club (and not without reason) as the town of Sparta, Mississippi from the movie “In the Heat of the Night,” with Aravosis in the Virgil Tibbs role played by Sidney Portier.

In the latter scenario, there’s still time (the press club event is scheduled for April 8) for someone at the club to emerge as Rod Steiger’s police chief character, Bill Gillespie, who realizes that his hopelessly compromised police force needs the expertise of Portier’s Philadelphia homicide detective to solve a local murder. I’m not sure who that would be at the moment, but I’m still optimistic.

(And no, I am not seriously comparing the situation of bloggers at the press club in 2005 to that of black men in the south in the early 1960′s.)

There are some Caddyshack elements to the story as well, but I don’t want to get lost in the movie database. The point is that bloggers are reacting as though we’ve been deliberately slighted by the press club, and the press club are completely baffled by the behavior of bloggers to whom they’re offering unprecedented access, via the presence of Wonkette, her fellow if mellower press scene columnist Garrett Graff, and actual blogger Matt Yglesias (the latter two of whom were added following howls of “Wonkette? Again???, even though it isn’t entirely her fault she has become the Dominic Dunne of bloggers), to the press club panel.

But it isn’t, in my view, a deliberate slight. It’s a combination of, initially, cluelessness, compounded by a growing sense of barbarians at the gate as filtered through a sense of outrage that the press club could be approached as mere journalistic mortals and that bloggers are so damned unappreciative of the press club’s willingness to respond so rapidly to our concerns. And now there’s the added pressure created by what I think is the growing realization that inviting Gannon-Guckert to the ball was a hideous and possibly irremediable error.

I’ll be somewhat surprised if anyone from the press club continues to respond to my emails at this point, but I’m still writing to various members in the hope of encouraging them to realize that they’ve screwed themselves and that the only way to make the miserable best of an impossible situation is to go down swinging: invite John Aravosis to the panel, study up on the increasing number of Gannon-Guckert plagiarism examples, and do their best to take their lumps and learn something from the debacle.

And it will be a debacle. If GG shows up and isn’t roasted, other members of the institutional press are going to tee off on the press club in print in epic fashion. If he shows up and is roasted, the right-wing will go into full cannibal mode, including, I’m sure, some members of the press club. If he doesn’t show up, the wingers will fault the press club for scaring him off. So there’s really no point in discussing “who is a journalist” without making very clear that whoever it is, isn’t Gannon-Guckert.

My last missive to the club, directed to the panel moderator (from whom I haven’t given up on hearing) was this:

If Gannon is there as an opinion leader, say so. If he’s there so you can beat him up about his access and plagiarism, say that. I think inviting him at all was a tragic error from which you’re not going to recover any time soon, but at least go down swinging.

And for heaven’s sake, invite Aravosis onto the panel. The guy has a law degree and a foreign service MA from Georgetown, he’s a former GOP Senate staffer, he worked at the World Bank and he’s been a stringer for The Economist: he’s not going to pee in the water glasses, he’s probably more qualified than any of the other panelists to address the putative subject of the discussion from both the traditionalist and blogger perspectives, and he may be the only person in the known universe who might get Gannon to say something other than “I don’t know” when he’s pressed about why he got that spectacular day pass streak.

I don’t know what’s going on internally over there but obviously you and the rest of the press club members involved with the panel do, and I think you’d be well served to share it with the outside world.

The press club are humans. They’re not Darth Vader or Richard Perle or other cartoon villains, they’re not stupid and I don’t think they’re terminally insular. They’re just way behind the curve here with very little time to catch up, and I think bloggers would be better served by trying to help them do that than by dismissing them as a bunch of ill-intentioned fossilized renegades from the 19th century. I don’t mean by that to refrain from things like Aravosis’ epic and completely justified rant in response to the “you can come if you keep your jimmies tucked away” comment, but to explain to a bunch of people who really don’t understand that their attitude is offensive and self-destructive, why it is and what they can do to fix it.

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