Posted on 02/18/2005 10:24:23 AM PST by areafiftyone
An explanation of what?
If it were not for these threads...I would have never heard of this "scandal".
Why are journalists that ask slanted non-questions welcomed into the White House Briefing room?
Happens all the time.
Asked and answered.
Next
I'm waiting to hear what was "more trivial" that "escalated into a nightmare" (oh, the agony of poor Duder!) for "SlickWilly".
LOL
I guess if he mentions one these "trival" matters he runs the risk of having to be presented with why it wasn't trivial, it was serious and the nightmare was Clinton's fault, whereas this current topic has nothing to do with President Bush.
They huff and they puff, but so far...no luck
~smirk~
"Fleischer said he did not know much about Guckert and could not recall exactly when he started covering press briefings. He said he played no part in approving Guckert's requests for daily press credentials (which were handled by his office) and could offer no further comment on that."
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000807754
Seems pretty obvious that Gannon got his daily credentials through Ari Fleischman's office. He got the credentials as a reporter, not as a gay prostitute.
Unless you believe the DU theories that the White House is a hotbed of gay orgies featuring the president himself...surely you don't believe the DU theories?
Duder's dead.
Gosh!
Minor correction. He never applied, so there was nothing to decline.
Novak and Noonan could have gotten a day pass anytime they wanted. The wait was for the background check for the "hard pass."
http://wizbangblog.com/archives/005127.php
So where's the Jeff Gannon/James Guckert story at these days? [Note: The pseudonym Gannon will be used for the rest of the article]
Even as the blogs investigating this story have continued to play the gay sex/escort/prostitution angle for all it's worth, focusing on the the ancillary allegations shows how marginal the story actually is.
Allegation - Jeff Gannon received a special permanent White House press "hard pass."
Fact - The bloggers who made that allegation have now retracted it. It appears that Gannon received day passes under his real name just as he has previously indicated.
Allegation - The White House should not have credentialed Gannon because he was a conservative shill not a real reporter.
Fact - Ari Fleischer, in an interview with Editor &Publisher, notes, "It is a slippery slope for any press secretary in any administration to pick and choose who gets a credential based on ideology, so long as they are a legitimate reporter." A debate on the merits of Gannon's journalistic credentials is beyond the scope of this post, but he certainly wrote and published stories at an online news organization, regardless of ones opinion of the relative quality of Talon News.
Allegation - The White House should have know about Gannon's sexual history and barred him from the White House.
Fact - Ari Fleischer, in an interview with Editor &Publisher, notes, "The last thing our nation needs is for anyone in the White House to concern themselves with the private lives of reporters. What right does the White House have to decide who gets to be a reporter based on private lives?"
Allegation - Gannon had full access to the White House and was running around unchecked in the White House for years.
Fact - To make it scarier the blogs perpetrating this angle of the story need to mention the sexual angle, but on its face it's a ridiculous claim. Regardless of how you try to spin it a day pass to the White House press briefings is not an all access pass. I don't know it for sure, but they probably hustle you right out of there when the events of the day are over.
Allegation - Gannon got a press pass while others were rejected.
Fact - Gannon was denied the only passes that matter in this story - the Capital Hill pass issued by the Standing Committee of Correspondents and the White House hard pass, which allows ongoing access to the White House press briefings. The White House hard pass requires a pass first be issued by the Standing Committee of Correspondents. Gannon was left to apply for the only other type of pass available, the daily pass. The daily pass, like its name implies, is good for one day only and by all indications does not have the same restrictions as to who may receive a pass as the the others do. While goofy Maureen Dowd complains that her pass was rejected, she most certainly was writing about a hard pass or a Standing Committee pass, which Gannon too was denied. If Dowd really wanted to cover the White House she could have stood in line for day passes too...
Allegation - Gannon attended a press briefing before Talon News was founded.
Fact - This appears to be true. Gannon appears to have attended a press briefing under the auspices of GOPUSA. From Ari Fleisher's interview it's not hard to imagine that Talon News was created to insulate the press coverage that GOPUSA decided it wanted to do from it's organization. This likely occurred in response to questions from Fleisher about whether GOPUSA was a party organization.
Allegation - Gannon received the Valeria Plame memo and was subpoenaed by the special prosecutor in the Plame case.
Fact - Highly unlikely. Tom McGuire and The Washington Post's Dan Froomkin debunk that myth pretty convincingly.
Allegation - Gannon asked softball questions.
Fact - True. This is the essence of the Gannongate story. Gannon was "outed" (not sexually) by mainstream media types with the help of David Brock's Media Matters For America. The reporters got their wish when Gannon quit. The bloggers continuing to pursue the story only "succeed" is they can claim a scalp besides Gannon's, which is why they continue to search for new angles to implicated ANYONE else...
Actually, he did apply for a Congressional "hard pass", and was declined because Talon News did not meet the standards set.
Take Rathergate for example - conservative bloggers excelled there because they were familiar with military procedures that called the memo formatting into question and with technical aspects of the print industry that exposed evidence of forgeries. The people who found these things did so because they knew how typesetting works and what the military procedures are.
If you look at the leftist blogs on Gannon though, 90% of the material they've unearthed is his ownership of gay porno websites. They've found comparatively little about anything he did as a reporter at the White House, but they've managed to unearth virtually every gay escort ad, nude photo, or fag website that Gannon/Guckert has ever visited. That tells me one thing about leftist bloggers: they're experts on gay porn websites and evidently know how to maneuver their way around them searching for dirt very efficiently. Too efficiently.
It's all over the leftist blogs like Kos and it is pretty sordid stuff. The guy evidently had gay escort service ads and sexually explicit photos of himself. Since the typical leftist blogger is the type that would probably use one of those escort services and visits homosexual porno sites on a daily basis, it is little surprise that they unearthed what they did.
One of the reasons conservatives excelled in Rathergate was because we have several ex-military people in our ranks who could point out problems in the memos plus some typesetting experts who could identify forgery.
Well, the left has its "experts" too, only they tend to be "experts" in things like dope growing, electric car repair, tofu vegetarian recipe cooking, skimming off the welfare system, and, yes, gay porno websites. If there's dirt out there on some purportedly conservative reporter owning a gay porno websites it's only a matter of time until a leftist finds it because that is simply what they do - they spend their lives on gay porno websites.
Talon News (which most conservatives, myself included, had never seen before until this scandal) screwed up in hiring such a sleazy person as Gannon/Guckert in the first place, but the whole thing is still way overblown in the MSM.
Even if he is a sex worker, this is a vile character assination, a personal attack. Suspiciously similar to charges against Cosby. This is totally unlike bloggers attempting to find out the truth about accusations by Rather and Jordan against Bush and the military. They were defending the wrongly accused, not headhunting MSM. All the left can do is accuse, slander, lie.
I'm not going to go that far...the White House press office did their background checks and found him to be no more a threat than Helen Thomas...agreed, that's cutting it thin, but there ya go. I'd heard he did have some involvement with developing websites,or webnames, but had left before they came to fruition. I had not heard anything from him involving administering them, unless it's new
the press has a nasty habit of parsing words, then allowing the echo chamber to expound in editorial largesse
..sordid personal life?
Ya mean like Barney Frank???
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