Etherzone : : Sex, Lies, and Jeff Gannon
Justin Raimondo neatly summarizes the Gannongate scandal. Democratic Underground also has a couple of useful summaries.
Meanwhile, with the exception of the LA Times's shameful appologia, the mass media is continuing to ignore the entire thing.
Meanwhile, with the exception of the LA Times's shameful appologia, the mass media is continuing to ignore the entire thing.
posted by Management at 8:59 AM
7 Comments:
SEX, LIES, AND JEFF GANNON
THE UNMAKING OF A MEDIA WHORE
By: Justin Raimondo
A gay prostitute, a phony media organization that managed to sneak its "reporter" into White House press briefings, and the lies that were fed to the media and the American people in the run-up to war with Iraq – what possible connection could these items have to one another?
The answer: a man called "Jeff Gannon."
Amid the media frenzy over Gannon's journalistic bona fides, or lack of them – and the lurid speculation going on in the left lane of the blogosphere about how a purported male hooker got admitted to White House press briefings before his "Talon News Agency" (a front group created by "GOPUSA") was even created – one has to ask: who cares?
Answer: Patrick J. Fitzgerald, for one, the chief prosecutor in an investigation that could rope in several high-ranking administration officials and even lead to the White House itself. And those of us who have been awaiting the come-uppance of this White House, for two, and are ready to get out the popcorn and the chips-and-dip and settle down for a nice long juicy scandal.
Let's go back to my column for Jan. 12, 2004, in which I pointed to an interview with Iraq war critic Joe Wilson conducted by Gannon. Wilson, a former ambassador to Gabon, was sent to Niger by the CIA to find out whether Saddam had been trying to procure uranium in that African nation as part of his weapons development program – you know, the one that turned out not to exist. When Wilson returned, he reported that no such attempt had been made, and he was therefore astonished when the president, in his 2003 State of the Union address, made reference to Saddam Hussein, who supposedly "sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." Wilson went public with his mission and its results, which is when the neocon smear machine went after him hammer and tongs. Robert Novak wrote a column in which administration officials were cited as saying that Wilson was a partisan out to get the president and had only gotten the job because his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA agent.
At that point, Ms. Plame's career as a covert agent – apparently assigned to nuclear nonproliferation issues – came to an abrupt end. A crime had been committed – a violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, which makes it a felony to "out" a CIA agent on a covert mission – and an investigation was launched. When then-Attorney General John Ashcroft recused himself and appointed a special counsel to look into the matter, the political implications of the case became clear.
Whoever was guilty of engineering the "outing" of Plame was also part of a more general effort to discredit Wilson – and head off any further investigation into how so much phony "intelligence" came to be touted by the president and his White House as "fact." The president's infamous "16 words" alluding to the Niger uranium caper supposedly launched by the Iraqis turned out to be based on an elaborate forgery – which was exposed by the scientists at the International Atomic Energy Agency, using Google, within hours of receiving the documents.
How did such a fantastic hoax get perpetrated on the Bush White House – and by whom? You can bet the Bushies were really interested in finding out the answers to these questions. That explains the otherwise mysterious Ashcroft recusal and the launching of an extensive investigation that, in its relentless hunt for information, has several journalists facing subpoenas and the threat of jail.
Enter Jeff Gannon, aka Jim Guckert, supposedly a journalist for the "Talon News Agency." Gannon, a familiar face at White House press briefings who had distinguished himself as outspokenly pro-Bush by the nature and tenor of his questions, somehow finagled Wilson into doing an interview, which was subsequently published on the Talon Web site (and then erased), in which he asked:
"An internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel details a meeting in early 2002 where your wife, a member of the agency for clandestine service working on Iraqi weapons issues, suggested that you could be sent to investigate the reports. Do you dispute that?"
How did Gannon get his hands on an "internal government memo" that was classified information? That's what I wanted to know last year at around this time, and the authorities were similarly interested, as the Washington Post reported:
"Sources said the CIA believes that people in the administration continue to release classified information to damage the figures at the center of the controversy, former ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV and his wife, Valerie Plame. …
"Sources said the CIA is angry about the circulation of a still-classified document to conservative news outlets suggesting Plame had a role in arranging her husband's trip to Africa for the CIA. The document, written by a State Department official who works for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), describes a meeting at the CIA where the Niger trip by Wilson was discussed, said a senior administration official who has seen it.
"CIA officials have challenged the accuracy of the INR document, the official said, because the agency officer identified as talking about Plame's alleged role in arranging Wilson's trip could not have attended the meeting."
It is true that news of the internal memo cited by Gannon had already appeared in the Wall Street Journal, but when confronted on the Free Republic Web site, where he frequently posted, as to the provenance of the memo and his knowledge of it, Gannon did not deny that he had seen it – and never so much as mentioned the Journal article. When a poster who calls himself "JohnGalt" challenged Gannon's contention that he was being persecuted and his professed ignorance of why he was on the list of journalists called before the Plame grand jury, Gannon got huffy quick:
JohnGalt: "Mr.Gannon is not being truthful when he says he does not know why he is being subpoenaed. When he interviewed Wilson last October he made reference to 'an internal government memo' purporting to be the minutes of a meeting at which Plame played a key role in getting her husband the Niger assignment. …. Gannon is suggesting that he was made privy to counterfeit official/government documents which is a crime, and a separate crime at that and logically he would be hauled in front of a grand jury probing the Plame affair."
To which Gannon replied:
"Your professed insight into the motivation of the grand jury is merely guesswork. The document in question has never been acknowleged by any government agency to even exist. This is a one-sided investigation where people are being accused of crimes for revealing names and information that may have not been secret in the first place."
JohnGalt: "That is simply not true, Jeff. You are ensnared because you made reference to a government document, which appears to have been a forgery. You need to tell the grand jury who made you privy to that document. … What was the document you referred to in the interview with Wilson?"
Gannon: "I disagree with your characterization of the document itself, but that aside, I maintain that I am under no obligation whatsoever to reveal my sources. That is a fundamental element of maintaining a free press."
At this point, Gannon could easily have cited the Wall Street Journal piece. But he didn't. Instead, he reiterated the same point he made to the two FBI agents who supposedly questioned him. According to Gannon's account, he told them the same thing: he couldn't reveal his sources. A Gannon interview with Editor & Publisher reveals:
"He also threw into question media accounts suggesting that he had seen a classified CIA document critical to the Plame case, saying he had made references to the 'internal memo,' but adding, 'I never said I had it or had seen it.' But when asked if he had in fact seen it, he declined to say."
While Gannon denied he had been subpoenaed to appear before the grand jury, admitted that he'd been questioned by the FBI, and "hinted" that he had never seen the internal memo, he added:
"I am not going to speak to that. It goes to something of a nature I do not want to discuss."
If, after all, Gannon had merely read about the memo in the Wall Street Journal, why this curious reticence? Is his readership of that rather staid publication really "something of a nature" this gay escort who charged $1,200 for a weekend fling would be too shy to discuss?
Later on in the JohnGalt-Gannon dialogue on Free Republic, it gets pretty hilarious:
Galt: "Sorry, Jeff, but you claimed in this report you did not [know] why you were being subpoenaed which is untrue. You know very well why you are being subpoenaed. You are a logical target for the Grand Jury probing either the forged Nigerian documents, 'forged' being the FBI's characterization not mine, or L'Affair Plame. The law does believe you are obligated so you are incorrect. While I would respect your integrity in accepting the consequences in refusing to release your sources, you are still obligated by the law to reveal who made you privy to the document you referenced. I am sure as a 'conservative' you understand the difference, don't you?"
Gannon: "Justin Raimondo is that you? I didn't think you hung out here anymore. Oops, now I've 'outed' someone else!"
Galt: "Sorry, Jeff, the only one 'outed' was you who claimed ignorance as to why you were being subpoenaed. I have been on this forum since 1997. Twenty-something; I sell software over the phone. Plenty of people on this forum have met me in the real world."
Gannon mistook this 20-something Freeper for me, a mistake no doubt occasioned by my March 8, 2004 follow-up on the Gannon saga:
"An interesting footnote: On the list of subpoenaed materials are included administration contacts with more than two dozen journalists. Included right up there with superstars such as Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, of the Washington Post, Evan Thomas (Newsweek), Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, Tim Russert, Nicholas D. Kristof, and Judith Miller, we have one Jeff Gannon, of something called 'Talon News.' So, what's up with that?"
Reminding my readers of the column cited above in which the significance of the Gannon-Wilson interview is underscored, I pointed out that the "internal document" cited by Gannon – like the Niger uranium forgeries – turned out to be completely bogus:
"There was just one problem with these documents: as in the Niger uranium forgeries, which listed ministers who hadn't served in years and got key facts wrong, these minutes of a purported meeting of CIA agents placed personnel in locations they couldn't possibly have been. Another forgery! Counterfeiting official documents is also a crime, particularly when it is done with the cooperation or complicity of government officials involved in a conspiracy.
"I advise Mr. Gannon to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, if he knows what's good for him."
He didn't listen – and look where he is today.
This story isn't about sex – although Gannon's reported sideline as a gay escort (or was his "journalism" the sideline?) could figure even more prominently as the personal and the political meet and merge in this case. It's about a bitterly fought internal power struggle inside the Bush administration, pitting the neoconservative clique centered in the office of the vice president and the civilian upper echelons of the Pentagon against the remnants of resistance in the intelligence community, in the top ranks of the military, and in the diplomatic corps. It's about the lies the former told in order to bamboozle Congress and the nation into a disastrous conflict in the Middle East – and the crimes they committed in covering up the lies. It's a story about the neocon "alternative" media – such as "Talon News" and its many proliferating clones in cyberspace and the world of print and television – the purpose of which is to refract and distort images of an unjust and increasingly troubling war into the illusion of "victory." It's about payola pundits and media whores who swallow the party line without question and without even charging a fee. If Gannon is a plant, then what about the other right-wing screamers and ranters with an identical agenda and tactics who are, in many cases, just as sleazy?
Who planted Gannon in the White House press pool, and gave him all that access – and to what purpose? Clearly part of the scheme was to lob softball questions at a beleaguered White House press secretary facing a barrage of pointed questions about the war and the Bush administration's many scandals. However, the idea was also to debunk and distract attention away from the questions that were beginning to be raised not only about the Plame matter, but also about the series of outright fabrications that represented a great deal of this administration's case for going to war. That case had been made by influential neocons now facing scrutiny from Congress and the Justice Department, and Gannon served as their personal pitbull, going after Wilson and other debunkers of the neocons' war myth.
As a gay man, I can't say that I understand Gannon's appeal to his clients in the escort business, but his attractions to the neoconized American right are all too easy to see: he offered Republican activists a more congenial view of the increasingly bad news from Iraq – and the home front – as a nefarious plot by the "biased" mainstream media (MSM) to make the president (and America) look bad.
That they bought it, and continue buying into it, is all the evidence we need that the neoconized "conservative" movement is not only brain dead, but dangerous to boot.
If we follow the slime trail left by Gannon and his sponsors all the way to the end, we'll stand face-to-face with the real authors of the Iraq war, and the full record of their crimes in the reckless pursuit of power and imperial glory. Gannon may be a minor player in all this, but then so was the Watergate burglary a minor escapade – the unraveling of which eventually led to the resignation of Richard M. Nixon and a general disillusionment with the neoconservative agenda of global interventionism.
What I wrote last winter about the Plame case applies equally to l'affaire Gannon:
"This case is about much more than the outing of a CIA agent: It's about a cabal of ruthless liars who stopped at nothing – not even treason – to achieve their goals, and kept lying (and committing forgery) even after they were caught. It's about a bogus war fought on account of faked 'evidence.' It's about the hijacking of American foreign policy on behalf of interests that are neither American nor morally defensible."
Despite the best efforts of the Corporate Media (more on them in a moment) the Gannon Scandal kept rolling last week. Since last week's Idiots, a number of new stories have come to light. First, it was revealed that Gannon was in fact selling himself for sex online while he was a member of the White House press corps. Then it came out that Gannon was actually in the White House as early as February 28, 2003 - a month before Talon News even existed, which completely disproves White House press secretary Scott McClellan's recent statement that "[Gannon], like anyone else, showed that he was representing a news organization that published regularly, and so he was cleared two years ago to receive daily passes, just like many others are." (Maureen Dowd meanwhile revealed that White House press passes simply aren't that easy to come by.)
Gannon himself decided to return to the airwaves, appearing on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 to "clarify" some of the earlier fibs he told, such as this one to Wolf Blitzer: "...before I came to Washington, I had registered various domain names for a private client. I was doing Web site development. Those sites were never hosted. There's - nothing ever went up on them. And the client went on to do something else. There's been so much about me on the Internet that people have, you know, made assumptions about..." During the Anderson Cooper interview (video courtesy of Crooks and Liars), Gannon refused to deny that he'd lied to Wolf Blitzer and portrayed himself as a victim who'd had his privacy violated (despite the fact that he was the only person responsible for posting naked pictures of himself online).
Our Jeff also had an interesting take on "journalism" when confronted with the fact that he'd plagiarized entire sections from White House press releases for his reports. "If I am communicating to my readers exactly what the White House believes on any certain issue," said Jeff, "that's reporting to them an unvarnished, unfiltered version of what they believe." Jesus Christ. Meanwhile, Ari Fleischer revealed that even he had doubts about Gannon's presence in the White House.
And with stories coming to light that Gannon was the person who broke the news that Mary Mapes was responsible for the CBS documents, had early access to the infamous August 6 PDB, may have had four hours advance knowledge of the bombing of Baghdad, and led the charge on unfounded accusations that John Kerry had an affair, we can't help wondering where he was getting his information from. Finally, Gannon went so far last week as to consider suing the bloggers who'd reported on this story for "political assassination." So now you can add frivolous lawsuits to the growing list of hypocrisies involved in this scandal. Heck, bring it on, I say. Let's get the whole story out there.
Two weeks ago, Jeff Gannon was number 2 on the Top 10 Conservative Idiots list for referring to Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid as people who are "divorced from reality" during a news conference with George W. Bush (see Idiots 184). Following that performance, we received an email from Mr. Gannon:
Subject: conservative idiot
Date: 2/4/2005 11:46 PM
From: Jeff Gannon
To: mail@democraticunderground.com
DU:
I promise to try harder to be #1.
Jeff Gannon
Little did we know just how seriously he would take this challenge! But let's skip past the tighty-whitey pics, the hot military stud websites, the tax fraud, the hilariously hypocritical articles and all those other distractions which surfaced last week, and focus on the real meat of this story. It turns out that Jeff Gannon - real name James D. Guckert - worked for "Talon News," which is intertwined with Republican activist organization GOPUSA. In fact, Talon News is not a real news organization - it's nothing more than a propaganda front for the Republican party. They published a series of hit-pieces (written by Gannon) during the 2004 election campaign, including the early rubbish about John Kerry having an affair, and many of the stories cribbed whole sections from White House press releases. How big is Talon News? In a recent interview with Wolf Blitzer (video), Gannon claimed that he had 700,000 daily subscribed readers. However, a quick check on Alexa.com reveals that the Talon News website is ranked 640,377. That means that there are approximately 640,376 more popular sites on the web. For comparison, DU is currently ranked 4,671 - so by Gannon-math that must mean we have about two hundred bazillion regular readers. But of course there is another big difference between DU and Jeff Gannon - we're not members of the White House press corps, and that's where the scandal really begins. Why is it that a fake journalist with a fake name working for a fake news organization is allowed into the White House briefing room - and not only allowed in, but constantly called upon to ask questions? In fact, some of Gannon's questions weren't even questions, like this one:
I'd like to comment on the angry mob that surrounded [senior Bush adviser] Karl Rove's house on Sunday. They chanted and pounded on the windows until the D.C. police and Secret Service were called in. The protest was organized by the National People's Action Coalition, whose members receive taxpayer funds, as well as financial support from groups including Theresa [sic] Heinz Kerry's Tides Foundation.
Good lord, I wouldn't want to be on the receiving end of that hardball! Scott McClellan must still have bruises! For more examples of Jeff asking the questions that really matter, take a look at this MSNBC video provided by Toolz Of The New School. But this, of course, is just the tip of the iceberg. Gannon's story has been told and re-told in much greater depth elsewhere (check out this David Brock video for a good Cliffs Notes version), and new details are still coming to light thanks to the efforts of bloggers all over the web. Next up: why was Gannon one of the only people who had access to classified documents naming Valerie Plame as a CIA operative? I suspect this story won't be going away any time soon, so Jeff, I just want to say congratulations. You pledged to be number one on the list this week and boy howdy, you really weren't kidding!
The real scandal of the Jeff Gannon story, is, of course, "what did the White House know, and when did they know it?" - and as usual, they're pretending not to know anything. However, last week Scott McClellan admitted that he knew Jeff Gannon was using an alias, because anyone who wants to get into a White House press briefing must provide their real name. Yet he consistently referred to Gannon/Guckert as "Jeff" when calling on him during press briefings - how kind of Scott to keep up the pretense. Additionally, Gannon didn't have full press credentials (or did he?) - in fact, he'd previously been denied a press pass to cover Congress on the grounds that Talon wasn't a real news organization. Yet somehow he was able to obtain daily passes to White House briefings whenever he felt like it. At a press conference last week, McClellan said, "...[Gannon], like anyone else, showed that he was representing a news organization that published regularly, and so he was cleared two years ago to receive daily passes, just like many others are." That's odd, because according to this DailyKos analysis, Talon started publishing "news" on April 1, 2003, and Jeff Gannon's first report from a White House briefing was on April 3, 2003. Considering that Gannon's partner in crime Bobby Eberle is a big-shot Texas Republican, and considering that it only took two days to come up with a White House press pass, and considering that Scottie liked to refer to Mr. James D. Guckert as "Jeff" on the many occasions he called on him for a question, it's hard to avoid the stench of rotting bullpoop emanating from the White House press secretary.
LA Times wins the award for WORST reporting of the mainstream media
by John in DC - 2/25/2005 10:11:00 AM
Yes, the Los Angeles Times ran a story today in which 6, count 'em, 6 sources were cited defending Gannon, and ZERO sources were quoted from the other side. And apparently, it's now "gay activists" who exposed Gannon (Markos is gay?!), rather than the top progressive blogs.
I have not seen this shoddy a piece of journalism in years. No one, no one, cites 6 sources on one side of a controversial story and ZERO sources on the other side. Did this reporter even call me? No. Did she contact the Kos people? I don't know, but if she did, she'd know that they're not "gay activists."
Truly one of the worst, shoddiest pieces of journalism I have ever seen. The mainstream media has decided they do NOT want to report this story. Absolutely pitiful.
WHITE HOUSE NOTEBOOK
An Identity Crisis Unfolds in a Not-So-Elite Press Corps
Defining a journalist has always been an inexact science, even before the Gannon affair.
By Johanna Neuman
Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2005
WASHINGTON — Its members work inside one of the most secure facilities in the nation, the White House, and they get to question America's most senior leaders, including the president.
Yet the White House press corps is not the thoroughly screened and scrubbed journalistic elite Americans might presume. Along with stars of the country's major media organizations, it has long included eccentrics, fringe players and characters of uncertain lineage.
And now, a semi-impostor has forced the White House and the mainstream reporters covering it to address a basic question:
What is a journalist?
It's a question the press corps and White House officials have tended to duck in the past — each for their own reasons. For reporters, policing the ranks smacks of undermining the 1st Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press. For White House officials, it has always seemed like an invitation to endless argument about who should be in and who should not — especially when newsletters, bloggers, cable news channels, satellite radio stations and Internet sites all claim a share of the turf that once belonged to a relative handful of news organizations.
Last month, however, the subject broke into the open after a reporter for the website Talon News asked President Bush how he could work on Social Security and other domestic initiatives with Democrats "who seem to have distanced themselves from reality."
The openly scornful and seemingly partisan description of congressional Democrats startled some veterans of the White House press room. And they wondered how Bush came to call on the relatively obscure reporter — not just this time, but on previous occasions as well.
That was only the beginning.
Left-wing bloggers soon revealed that the reporter, whom colleagues knew as Jeff Gannon, was really named James Dale Guckert. They also disclosed that Talon News was owned by an avowedly partisan website called GOPUSA. The website in turn was the creation of a conservative Texas political activist named Bobby Eberle.
That stirred a furor over how a seeming Republican agent got clearance to attend White House briefings as a journalist. Soon Gannon resigned.
Then gay activists, indulging in what one media critic called "bloglust," [source 1] posted on the Internet homoerotic photos of Gannon advertising himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort.
"I've made mistakes in my past," Gannon told [source 2] the Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?"
Apparently not.
Gannon did not have a permanent White House press pass that requires an FBI background check. Those who carry it have clear access to the White House and frequently travel with the president. And the Standing Committee of Correspondents on Capitol Hill, which accredits more than 2,000 journalists who write for daily news organizations, refused to give him a congressional press pass.
But Gannon was admitted to the White House on a regular basis over the last two years. Applying as Guckert, he was given a series of one-day passes.
Marlin Fitzwater, former press secretary to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said in an interview that he created day passes in response to a federal court decision in the late 1970s requiring the White House to admit all journalists unless the Secret Service deemed them threats to the president or his immediate family.
The lawsuit involved Robert Sherrill of the Nation, who was denied a press pass on the Secret Service's recommendation because, it turned out, he had punched out the press secretary to the governor of Florida.
The White House press corps has since attracted an array of unusual personalities. There was Naomi Nover of the Nover News Service. No one ever saw her work published, but Nover — whose coif of white hair somewhat resembled George Washington's wig — got past a security cordon during a Reagan trip to China after a reporter showed guards a U.S. dollar bill as evidence of how important she was.
Lester Kinsolving, conservative radio commentator, wore a clerical collar to White House briefings in the Reagan years. His loud voice and off-beat, argumentative questions often provoked laughter. President Clinton, to lighten up the proceedings, often called on Sarah McLendon, who worked for a string of small newspapers in Texas and called herself a citizen journalist unafraid to blast government bureaucrats.
"If you look at the question Gannon asked, it obviously reflected his conservative views," Fitzwater said.
"But it's no different from the ones Helen Thomas [formerly of United Press International, now of Hearst] asked of Reagan, or Dan Rather [of CBS] asked in his more famous comments about Richard Nixon. [source 3]
"This guy [Gannon] got caught and he's a little weirder than most — but he's no weirder than Evelyn Y. Davis," said Fitzwater, referring to the shareholder advocate who covers the White House for her corporate newsletter, "Highlights and Lowlights."
"I've always thought it was dangerous for the White House to get into the business of defining who is and is not a member of the press corps," said Clinton White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry. "That is better done by the news media." [source4]
Reporters, too, seem reluctant to join the fray. The White House Correspondents Assn. met last week with White House spokesman Scott McClellan, but no action has been taken.
"We wanted to err on the side of inclusion," said Steve Scully of C-SPAN, who serves on the executive board. "Once you start dictating who is a journalist, you go down a slippery slope." [source 5]
Former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who gave Gannon a day pass even before Talon News was launched, told the trade magazine Editor & Publisher that at one point he hesitated to call on the reporter, then resumed after being assured he was not a GOP plant.
Still, the impression lingers for some that the Bush White House — with its reputation for stage-managing the news — orchestrated softball questions. [no sources cited for the opposing view] Others say the White House is simply a magnet for those eager to usurp its stage.
"I look at the Gannon story — I used to refer to him as Jeff GOP — as demonstrating the impact of televising the press briefing," said Martha Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University.
"The television lens has brought into the briefing room people who have a political viewpoint and find the briefing a way to express it." [source 6]
A better question: What is journalism?
by Joe in DC - 2/25/2005 11:14:00 AM
The LA Times story about Gannon says a lot about the state of the mainstream media (MSM).
Somehow, Ms. Neuman has managed to make the Gannon story about them...and it is, but not the way she thinks.
She said, the MSM is being forced to ask: What is a journalist? Here's a better question for the MSM: what is journalism?
Neuman's piece is a classic example of present day journalism. It's an example of how far the MSM has gone to avoid covering the real issues in Gannongate. When describing the research done on Gannon by bloggers, she uses terms "left wing bloggers" "gay activists" and "bloglust." Her words imply a lack of credibility.
When she writes of Jeff, there are no similar "descriptors" applied to him, GOPUSA or Talon News.
Reporters are trying so hard to be fair, and not piss off the right wing, that they are becoming part of the Right Wing Noise Machine. It's actually frightening. Maybe Ms. Neuman talked to some of bloggers from the "left wing." She didn't talk to John Aravosis, who is apparently consigned to the role of "gay activist" as if Americablog is nothing more.
This is the first major story the LA Times wrote about Gannon and they couldn't interview any of the players who broke the story?
I've said it before, this story played out right under the noses of the media. Jeff/Jim was among them. He essentially mocked them....and continues to do so. Maybe that's why they can't cover the story. It involves self-examination and self-criticism. And, it might involve pissing off the White House. Then, they might not get their Presidential nicknames. That would really suck.
The story seems to be about more whores than we realized.
WHITE HOUSE NOTEBOOK
An Identity Crisis Unfolds in a Not-So-Elite Press Corps
Defining a journalist has always been an inexact science, even before the Gannon affair.
By Johanna Neuman
Times Staff Writer
February 25, 2005
WASHINGTON — Its members work inside one of the most secure facilities in the nation, the White House, and they get to question America's most senior leaders, including the president.
Yet the White House press corps is not the thoroughly screened and scrubbed journalistic elite Americans might presume. Along with stars of the country's major media organizations, it has long included eccentrics, fringe players and characters of uncertain lineage.
And now, a semi-impostor has forced the White House and the mainstream reporters covering it to address a basic question:
What is a journalist?
It's a question the press corps and White House officials have tended to duck in the past — each for their own reasons. For reporters, policing the ranks smacks of undermining the 1st Amendment's guarantee of freedom of the press. For White House officials, it has always seemed like an invitation to endless argument about who should be in and who should not — especially when newsletters, bloggers, cable news channels, satellite radio stations and Internet sites all claim a share of the turf that once belonged to a relative handful of news organizations.
Last month, however, the subject broke into the open after a reporter for the website Talon News asked President Bush how he could work on Social Security and other domestic initiatives with Democrats "who seem to have distanced themselves from reality."
The openly scornful and seemingly partisan description of congressional Democrats startled some veterans of the White House press room. And they wondered how Bush came to call on the relatively obscure reporter — not just this time, but on previous occasions as well.
That was only the beginning.
Left-wing bloggers soon revealed that the reporter, whom colleagues knew as Jeff Gannon, was really named James Dale Guckert. They also disclosed that Talon News was owned by an avowedly partisan website called GOPUSA. The website in turn was the creation of a conservative Texas political activist named Bobby Eberle.
That stirred a furor over how a seeming Republican agent got clearance to attend White House briefings as a journalist. Soon Gannon resigned.
Then gay activists, indulging in what one media critic called "bloglust," posted on the Internet homoerotic photos of Gannon advertising himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort.
"I've made mistakes in my past," Gannon told the Washington Post's media critic, Howard Kurtz. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?"
Apparently not.
Gannon did not have a permanent White House press pass that requires an FBI background check. Those who carry it have clear access to the White House and frequently travel with the president. And the Standing Committee of Correspondents on Capitol Hill, which accredits more than 2,000 journalists who write for daily news organizations, refused to give him a congressional press pass.
But Gannon was admitted to the White House on a regular basis over the last two years. Applying as Guckert, he was given a series of one-day passes.
Marlin Fitzwater, former press secretary to Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, said in an interview that he created day passes in response to a federal court decision in the late 1970s requiring the White House to admit all journalists unless the Secret Service deemed them threats to the president or his immediate family.
The lawsuit involved Robert Sherrill of the Nation, who was denied a press pass on the Secret Service's recommendation because, it turned out, he had punched out the press secretary to the governor of Florida.
The White House press corps has since attracted an array of unusual personalities. There was Naomi Nover of the Nover News Service. No one ever saw her work published, but Nover — whose coif of white hair somewhat resembled George Washington's wig — got past a security cordon during a Reagan trip to China after a reporter showed guards a U.S. dollar bill as evidence of how important she was.
Lester Kinsolving, conservative radio commentator, wore a clerical collar to White House briefings in the Reagan years. His loud voice and off-beat, argumentative questions often provoked laughter. President Clinton, to lighten up the proceedings, often called on Sarah McLendon, who worked for a string of small newspapers in Texas and called herself a citizen journalist unafraid to blast government bureaucrats.
"If you look at the question Gannon asked, it obviously reflected his conservative views," Fitzwater said.
"But it's no different from the ones Helen Thomas [formerly of United Press International, now of Hearst] asked of Reagan, or Dan Rather [of CBS] asked in his more famous comments about Richard Nixon.
"This guy [Gannon] got caught and he's a little weirder than most — but he's no weirder than Evelyn Y. Davis," said Fitzwater, referring to the shareholder advocate who covers the White House for her corporate newsletter, "Highlights and Lowlights."
"I've always thought it was dangerous for the White House to get into the business of defining who is and is not a member of the press corps," said Clinton White House Press Secretary Mike McCurry. "That is better done by the news media."
Reporters, too, seem reluctant to join the fray. The White House Correspondents Assn. met last week with White House spokesman Scott McClellan, but no action has been taken.
"We wanted to err on the side of inclusion," said Steve Scully of C-SPAN, who serves on the executive board. "Once you start dictating who is a journalist, you go down a slippery slope."
Former Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who gave Gannon a day pass even before Talon News was launched, told the trade magazine Editor & Publisher that at one point he hesitated to call on the reporter, then resumed after being assured he was not a GOP plant.
Still, the impression lingers for some that the Bush White House — with its reputation for stage-managing the news — orchestrated softball questions. Others say the White House is simply a magnet for those eager to usurp its stage.
"I look at the Gannon story — I used to refer to him as Jeff GOP — as demonstrating the impact of televising the press briefing," said Martha Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University.
"The television lens has brought into the briefing room people who have a political viewpoint and find the briefing a way to express it."
See no Gannon, hear no Gannon, speak no Gannon
Why has the mainstream media ignored the White House media access scandal?
Feb. 25, 2005 | On Feb. 17, "NBC Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams introduced a report on controversial White House correspondent James Guckert by informing viewers that the saga was "the talk of Washington." Nine days later the mysterious tale of an amateur, partisan journalist who slipped into the White House under false pretenses remains the buzz of the Beltway. Yet most mainstream reporters have opted not to cover the story. Two of the television networks, as well as scores of major metropolitan newspapers around the country, have completely ignored it.
"It's stunning to me that there are questions about the independent press being undermined and the mainstream press doesn't seem that interested in it," says Joe Lockhart, who served as press secretary during President Clinton's second term. "People in the mainstream press have shrugged their shoulders and said, 'It's a whole lot of nothing.'"
"It's difficult to explain," adds John Aravosis, who publishes Americablog.com, which has been instrumental in breaking news on "Gannongate." "What more do we need for this story to be reported on seriously? It's everything Washington loves in a story. But the response is literally, 'Ew, we can't touch this.'" (The story itself refuses to die. On Thursday, while Guckert's former employer Talon News was going dark, Guckert relaunched his Web site, complete with a request for donations to "fight back against the well funded attack machine on the Left.")
Ordinarily, revelations that a former male prostitute, using an alias (Jeff Gannon) and working for a phony news organization, was ushered into the White House -- without undergoing a full-blown security background check -- in order to pose softball questions to administration officials would qualify as news by any recent Beltway standard. Yet as of Thursday, ABC News, which produces "Good Morning America," "World News Tonight With Peter Jennings," "Nightline," "This Week," "20/20" and "Primetime Live," has not reported one word about the three-week-running scandal. Neither has CBS News ("The Early Show," "The CBS Evening News," "60 Minutes," "60 Minutes Wednesday" and "Face the Nation"). NBC and its entire family of morning, evening and weekend news programs have addressed the story only three times. Asked about the lack of coverage, a spokesperson for ABC did not return calls seeking comment, while a CBS spokeswoman said executives were unavailable to discuss the network's coverage.
Perhaps nobody is surprised that Republican-friendly Fox News has gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid covering the Guckert story and the embarrassing questions it raises for the Bush White House. Since the story began to take shape earlier this month, Fox News has filled more than 500 hours of programming. During that span the name "Jeff Gannon" has been uttered just five times on the air, according to a search of the LexisNexis electronic database of television news transcripts. And at no point have the facts surrounding the story been explained to Fox's viewers. (Dependable Republican ally Matt Drudge, who in the past has gleefully trumpeted media scandals, has also been allergic to Gannongate, posting just one link to date on his Web site.)
But it is surprising that a program like MSBNC's "Hardball," which touts itself as the home of authentic Beltway chatter and which has aired 15 episodes since the Guckert story first emerged, has dedicated just one segment from one show to the Guckert controversy. MSNBC's "Countdown With Keith Olbermann," however, has been much more aggressive in covering the story. Only CNN has covered the story with any kind of consistency among the 24-hour news channels.
Meanwhile on the newsstands, through Thursday, there had been no meaningful coverage in USA Today or in the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, San Francisco Chronicle, Indianapolis Star, Denver Post, Oakland Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer, to name a few that have effectively boycotted the White House press office scandal. Leo Wolinsky, deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says the Times is running its first Guckert story on Friday, focusing on the guidelines for securing White House press passes. "It's a bit late," he concedes. "We may have been a bit slow to recognize it had become a story of public interest." Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, did not return calls seeking comment on that paper's decision to not report on the story.
At some papers there has been a confusing disconnect for readers between the opinion pages and the news pages when it comes to Gannongate. The Miami Herald, for instance, ran a column by Leonard Pitts decrying the scandal and the lack of outcry it has sparked. The column generated some letters from readers who agreed, criticizing the mainstream media's relative silence on the story. Yet readers who stuck only to the news pages never saw any reference to the Guckert story; it simply did not exist. The same is true of the Detroit Free Press and the San Francisco Chronicle: Both papers published stinging editorials denouncing the White House for letting a fake reporter into briefings, yet neither paper's news sections bothered to cover the controversy.
As for the editorial pages, it's curious that the nation's five largest papers, all pillars of the media establishment (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today), have been silent on the Guckert saga -- especially when dailies in more out-of-the-way places such as Tulsa, Okla.; Bangor, Maine; Niagara Falls, N.Y.; Augusta County, Va.; and Pensacola, Fla., have all deemed the story troubling enough to require attention, as noted by Media Matters for America, a liberal advocacy group that first raised questions about Guckert and Talon News.
Addressing the media's timidity, Aravosis suggests there's still a reticence on the part of the press, post-Sept. 11, to be tough on President Bush and the Republican White House. "It's getting ridiculous," he says. "It's been three and a half years, and we're still treating him with kid gloves." Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page recently wrote, "If America's mainstream media really were as liberal as conservatives claim we are, we would be ballyhooing the fiasco of James D. Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, with Page 1 banner headlines and hourly bulletins." Instead, the mainstream media is averting its eyes.
It's possible that when the Guckert story took an unexpected turn into the world of gay male escorts some news organizations became skittish about pursuing it, despite the fact that the specifics were laid out, complete with on-the-record confirmation, on Web sites like Americablog.com. Howard Kurtz, who has covered the story for the Washington Post, told the Boston Phoenix this week, "I was surprised at how many major news organizations lagged in telling their readers and viewers what everybody on the Internet already knows: that this guy has a history of posting naked pictures of himself on gay-escort sites." The truth is that many major news organizations have yet to even mention Guckert's name to their viewers and readers, let alone detail his past as a male escort.
What's also curious is that last December another media controversy erupted over the role a journalist played in posing a controversial question to top White House officials. It involved a reporter for the Chattanooga Free Times Press, Edward Lee Pitts, who helped a National Guardsman craft a tough question posed to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld regarding the lack of body armor for U.S. soldiers fighting in Iraq. Rumsfeld's at-times-cavalier response created a small firestorm. ("You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want or wish to have at a later time.") The revelation that Pitts was involved in formulating the question, and the debate over whether he overstepped a journalistic boundary, soon became a story onto itself in the mainstream press. Unlike Guckert, who was criticized for bending the rules to toss softball questions to administration officials, Pitts was accused of bending the rules to ask a question that was too hard.
Although the Pitts story lasted for only one 24-hour news cycle, it was covered by virtually every major news outlet, including ABC, CBS, Fox, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, the Miami Herald, the Detroit Free Press, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Chronicle -- the very same news organizations that, three weeks into the Guckert saga, have failed to acknowledge the story even exists.
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About the writer
Eric Boehlert is a senior writer at Salon.
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