Posted on 02/25/2005 3:26:46 PM PST by woofie
Edited on 02/25/2005 3:29:51 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
The emails keep pouring in with this plea: Investigate Gannongate! These messages are obviously part of a campaign among liberal Internet activists who believe the controversy concerning Jeff Gannon (aka James Guckert) has not received sufficient media attention. Gannon/Guckert was a conservative reporter for a marginal news outfit who obtained a daily pass to the White House press office and who also apparently was seeking customers as a gay, military-oriented prostitute. Serious questions do remain as to why and how the Bush White House's press operation granted access to Gannon/Guckert, a correspondent for the Talon News. Should a fellow with a fake identity--and a questionable background--be allowed into presidential press conferences? Talon News was connected to GOPUSA, an organization run by Texas-based Republican activist Bobby Eberle, and Gannon/Guckert routinely asked softball questions of Bush's press secretaries during their daily White House briefings. But throughout this scandal, I have wondered if the Gannon affair may be smaller than it seems. I expressed several concerns in an earlier column. Still, in response to the emails, I decided to heed the call and look further. What I found leads me to ask--gasp!--if Gannon/Guckert, on a few but not all fronts, has received a quasi-bum rap.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
Even the left can see that this is bogus
OK, let me shake my head, have that drink, ok, I'm ready now. Here goes:
David Corn said something I agree with?
Nope, can't be, must be still inside The Matrix, will try again later.
Its a pretty cold day in Hell today
My read is they don't want to go down the gay road because such investigation will necessitate a look in many of their own closets.
He's still funny-looking, so THERE!
Ping
Freedom of the Press is kinda hard if the reporters are under a microscope
Almost as shocking as CBS giving web space to ... David Corn!
Well, no, THAT's not schocking at all. Him getting Rather's anchor chair wouldn't be, either. But him saying something rational? OK, THAT's just too wacky!
You're prolly right ... musta been the Red Hook talking! ;)
Hmmm. How do they feel about Hillary Rodham, and Teresa Heinz?
I guess that they are fortunate that Jerry Rivers now works for Fox News.
If they can't bowl David Corn over, then this can't even be a flash in the pan. It must be a wet match in the pan.
The Slaughter/Conyers letter shows how far off the rails well-intentioned people can go when scandal is in the air. I would not discourage anyone from responsibly investigating the questions that linger in the Gannon/Guckert affair. Perhaps the story will lead to further--and more serious--revelations of White House wrongdoing. But with the blogosphere ready-made for piling on and for the fast and widespread transmission of inaccurate information, the Gannon/Guckert tale has been susceptible to distortion. I have no brief for Gannon/Guckert. I am a fan of blogging and celebrate the rise of web-based independent researchers who can pursue matters ignored or neglected by the old media. But the limited inquiry I conducted convinces me that in this brave new world of blogging it is easy for information to outpace accuracy. Those emails I have received are, in a way, right: we need investigation, but investigation that can keep up with dissemination.
I guess that they are fortunate that Jerry Rivers now works for Fox News.
Geraldo Rivera.
To me, this says it all [and more]:
REPUBLICANS, BLOGGERS AND GAYS, OH MY!
by Ann Coulter
In response to the public disgrace and ruin of New York Times editor Howell Raines, CBS anchor Dan Rather and CNN news director Eason Jordan, liberals are directing their fury at the blogs. Once derided as people sitting around their living rooms in pajamas, now obscure writers for unknown Web sites are coming under more intensive background checks than CIA agents.
The heretofore-unknown Jeff Gannon of the heretofore-unknown "Talon News" service was caught red-handed asking friendly questions at a White House press briefing. Now the media is hot on the trail of a gay escort service that Gannon may have run some years ago. Are we supposed to like gay people now, or hate them? Is there a Web site where I can go to and find out how the Democrats want me to feel about gay people on a moment-to-moment basis?
Liberals keep rolling out a scrolling series of attacks on Gannon for their Two Minutes Hate, but all their other charges against him fall apart after three seconds of scrutiny. Gannon's only offense is that he may be gay.
First, liberals claimed Gannon was a White House plant who received a press pass so that he could ask softball questions -- a perk reserved for New York Times reporters during the Clinton years. Their proof was that while "real" journalists (like Jayson Blair) were being denied press passes, Gannon had one, even though he writes for a Web site that no one has ever heard of -- but still big enough to be a target of liberal hatred! (By the way, if writing for a news organization with no viewers is grounds for being denied a press pass, why do MSNBC reporters have them?)
On the op-ed page of The New York Times, Maureen Dowd openly lied about the press pass, saying: "I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the 'Barberini Faun' is credentialed?"
Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that dyspeptic, old Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president. Still, it would be suspicious if Dowd were denied a press pass while someone from "Talon News" got one, even if he is a better reporter.
But Dowd was talking about two different passes without telling her readers (a process now known in journalism schools as "Dowdification"). Gannon didn't have a permanent pass; he had only a daily pass. Almost anyone can get a daily pass -- even famed Times fantasist Maureen Dowd could have gotten one of those. A daily pass and a permanent pass are altogether different animals. The entire linchpin of Dowd's column was a lie. (And I'm sure the Times' public editor will get right on Dowd's deception.)
Finally, liberals expressed shock and dismay that Gannon's real name is "James Guckert." On MSNBC's "Hardball," Chris Matthews introduced the Gannon scandal this way: "Coming up, how did a fake news reporter from a right-wing Web site get inside the White House press briefings and presidential news conferences?"
Reporter David Shuster then gave a report on "the phony alias Guckert used to play journalist" -- as opposed to the real name Shuster uses to play journalist. (You can tell Schuster is a crackerjack journalist because he uses phrases like "phony alias.") With all the subtlety of a gay-bashing skinhead, Matthews spent the rest of the segment seeing how many times he could smear Gannon by mentioning "HotMilitaryStuds.com" and laughing.
Any day now, Matthews will devote entire shows to exposing Larry Zeigler, Gerald Riviera and Michael Weiner -- aka Larry King, Geraldo Rivera and Matthews' former MSNBC colleague Michael Savage. As a newspaper reporter, Wolf Blitzer has written under the names Ze'ev Blitzer and Ze'ev Barak. The greatest essayist of modern times was Eric Blair, aka George Orwell. The worst essayist of modern times is "TRB" of The New Republic.
Air America radio host and "Nanny" impersonator "Randi Rhodes" goes by a fake name, and she won't even tell people what her real last name is. (She says for "privacy reasons." That name must be a real doozy.) As Insideradio.com describes Rhodes, she refuses "to withhold anything from her listeners" and says conservatives "are less likely to share such things." How about sharing your name, Randi? We promise not to laugh.
Democrats in Congress actually demanded that an independent prosecutor investigate how Gannon got into White House press conferences while writing under an invented name. How did Gary Hartpence, Billy Blythe and John Kohn (Gary Hart, Bill Clinton and John Kerry) run for president under invented names? Admittedly, these men were not reporters for the prestigious "Talon News" service; they were merely Democrats running for president.
Liberals keep telling us the media isn't liberal, but in order to retaliate for the decimation of major news organizations like The New York Times, CBS News and CNN, all they can do is produce the scalp of an obscure writer for an unknown conservative Web page. And unlike Raines, Rather and Jordan, they can't even get Gannon for incompetence on the job. (Also unlike Raines, Rather and Jordan, Gannon has appeared on TV and given a series of creditable interviews in his own defense, proving our gays are more macho than their straights.)
Gannon didn't write about gays. No "hypocrisy" is being exposed. Liberals' hateful, frothing-at-the-mouth campaign against Gannon consists solely of their claim that he is gay.
(CIA officials told reporters the information in the memo was wrong.)
Those anonymous "CIA officials" turn out to have been giving these reporters disinformation. We now know the memo was real and it did reveal that Plame recommended her husband.
I know it's slightly off-topic from Gannon, but Corn notes the above about what the CIA was telling reporters and I just had to highlight it.
I further see Corn did what I have done on this forum; he juxtaposes Gannon's question to Wilson with the earlier WSJ description of the memo and Corn points out the similarities between the two. This goes to buttress the obvious to me point that Gannon did not have special access to the memo, but had read the WSJ.
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