Free Republic

WASHINGTON – Disclosures that an alleged homosexual escort working for a pro-Republican website was granted access to the White House press room has led to efforts in the nation's homosexual press to "out" top-ranking Bush administration officials and GOP leaders based on uncorroborated, undocumented and unnamed sources. In the last week, reports in New York's Gay City News and 365Gay.com and other homosexual-friendly publications and blogs have made specific allegations about individuals based exclusively on unnamed sources and rumors and playing off the sensational revelations about Jeff Gannon – by daylight a credentialed "reporter" covering the White House for two...

The American left has been guilty of many contemptible actions over the past twenty years, but few are so deeply offensive as its treatment of Jim Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon (His real name is Guckert, but he adopted Gannon as a pen name). Gannon is, apparently, a homosexual with a rather sordid past, including stints working as a gay escort. He is now trying to make a career for himself as a reporter; until a week or two ago, he worked for the online Talon News Service. He was able to get one-day-at-a-time passes to attend White House press briefings,...

It was reported yesterday that Jeff Gannon had bragged to the Free Republic.com website that he fed information to Sean Hannity about Mary Mapes which would discredit Dan Rather's sources on the Texas National Guard Story.Hannity started his all out assault on Rather and CBS on the same date. 'Mary Mapes is definitely behind the story,' Gannon wrote on Free Republic Sept. 10, 2004. 'This is who I told Sean Hannity got the documents. She also obtained the Abu Gharib photos.''I got the scoop and passed it on to Hannity,' Gannon added. Look for my detailed story Monday at Talon...

The mole, the US media and a White House coup The reporter who wasn't is part of a wider press scandal, writes Paul Harris in New York Paul Harris Sunday February 20, 2005 Observer For two years Jeff Gannon cut an unobtrusive figure at White House press conferences. The shaven-headed, craggily handsome man worked for an obscure news agency called Talon News, known for its conservative sympathies. He was often the subject of jokes by colleagues on weightier news organisations. No one is laughing now, because Gannon was far from being a harmless distraction. He was writing under a false...

Bloggers go big-game hunting As Internet `journalists' bag another prize, Tim Harper considers the consequences for mainstream media TIM HARPER Often witty, sometimes racy, certainly irreverent, frequently sanctimonious, the blogosphere has been bulking up for years. But the mainstream media have long taken a largely dismissive approach to this world of online political journals: Open. Peek. Chuckle. Close. No more. The growing army of American cyber-pundits hunched over their search engines has begun to wield strength that no one predicted. The bloggers have brought down the powerful. They have unmasked an impostor in the White House briefing room. Perhaps most...

FYI - On now...bloggers' role in story reporting and relevance of Gannon's past.

Jeff Gannon is considering suing liberal interest groups, bloggers and others for a "political assassination" that drove him from his job as a reporter for a conservative news outfit called Talon News, he told NEWSWEEK. Gannon, whose real name is James Guckert, singled out Media Matters—a "well-funded" liberal group headed by longtime "attack dog" David Brock. ("Everything we wrote about him came from the public record," Brock replied.)

Posted at 07:42 PM | Comments (0) New proof of "Gannon"'s early WH access Yesterday, former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, in self-defense mode, claimed that he had suspicions about reporter "Jeff Gannon" and his ties to a group called GOPUSA, and that he stopped calling on him at White House briefings. That may be so, but Campaign Extra! has unearthed proof that Fleischer called on "Gannon" for a softball question at a White House press briefing on March 4, 2003 -- some 25 days before the Talon News website was registered. What's more, "Gannon"'s "journalism" in early...

Stunned by the liberal mini-tempest over Talon News reporter "Jeff Gannon" (real name: James Guckert) asking a softball question to President Bush on January 26, leaders of the White House Correspondents Association met with Bush press spokesman Scott McClellan Tuesday to discuss tightening up the press-credentialing process. Liberal media elitists say they want only "real" journalists, not "partisan operatives," to be allowed in the White House briefing room. But what they really might wind up accomplishing with their "Gannongate" pounding was the silencing of rare right-leaning voice in the White House press corps. To them, you can only be "authentic"...

saturday, february 19, 2005   Pathetically Cosmic Comedy at Kos A Kos Kid is connecting the dots and abusing the punctuation, in one of the best Daily Kos posts ever: Gannon scoop shows White House Forged TANG/CBS memos?!?! (Hat tip: Tim Blair.) It now appears that Jeff Gannon could be the thread that unravels the real story behind the TANG/CBS forgeries. I have put together a case here that if looked at carefully by the blogosphere would show that the TANG forgeries were made by the White House, probably Dan Bartlett, and then given to Bill Burkett by a former...

The blogospheric probe had gotten ugly—democrats.com charged that Guckert "dabbled in male prostitution rings (through registration of sites like Hotmilitarystud.com [and] Militaryescorts.com," and alleged that "he was bringing male prostitutes into the White House." (Guckert acknowledged registering the gay sites, but said he did so for a client while he was working to set up a Web hosting business in Wilmington, Del. But new pictures that emerged this week tell a different story. Check out http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/02/man-called-jeff.html.) Left behind after the smoke cleared were a few fundamental questions: What is a reporter? Does asking biased or loaded questions invalidate a reporter's...

I got a real creepy feeling reading his description of the photos of this Gannon guy. Howie is REALLY into this. I can't decide if it's because he for SOME reason doesn't want to cover the Eason Jordon story in-depth, or because he finds this story just so much more interesting than anything else going on in the world right now.

The following is the transcript of the Friday night CNN interview of Jeff Gannon/James Guckert by Anderson Cooper. COOPER: There are many questions that have been raised about whether or not -- people raising the specter that you are somehow a White House plant. Are you a White House plant? Were you (UNINTELLIGIBLE)? GANNON: Absolutely not. As a matter of fact, how I came to be at the White House is I asked to attend a briefing. I asked the White House Press Office. They gave me a daily pass to get in. COOPER: This liberal group, Media Matters, which...

Jeff Gannon Admits Past 'Mistakes,' Berates Critics Saturday, February 19, 2005; Page C01 Jeff Gannon, the former White House reporter whose naked pictures have appeared on a number of gay escort sites, says that he has "regrets" about his past but that White House officials knew nothing about his salacious activities. "I've made mistakes in my past," he said yesterday. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?" Gannon chastised his critics, breaking a silence that began last week when liberal bloggers disclosed his real name, James Dale Guckert, and a...

GANNON: ...I have made mistakes in my past. And these are all of a very personal and private nature that have been -- that have been all brought to the surface by people who disagreed with the question I asked at the presidential press conference several weeks ago. And is -- the effect of this has been that we seem to have established a new standard for journalists in this country, where if someone disagrees with you, then your personal life, your private life, and anything you have ever done in the past is going to be brought up for...

February 18, 2005 Doubts About White House Reporter Recalled By ANNE E. KORNBLUT ASHINGTON, Feb. 17 - A former Bush administration official said Thursday that a reporter calling himself Jeff Gannon who presented questionable news credentials from an obscure Internet organization, Gopusa, aroused suspicions at the White House a few years ago. The official, Ari Fleischer, who was White House press secretary, said he briefly stopped calling on the reporter at the daily briefings."I thought, 'I need to look into this and see if he's part of the Republican Party,' " Mr. Fleischer said in an interview on Thursday....

Rove- Gannon Connection? WASHINGTON, Feb. 18, 2005 Karl Rove's hope to become a respected policymaker will be hampered if the dirty tricks from his political past are more apparent than his desire to spread liberty around the globe. Karl Rove took a victory lap at an SRO lunch at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting at the Ronald Reagan building in Washington on Thursday. After a glowing introduction by Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association, Rove proclaimed "conservatism as the dominant political creed in America," but warned Republicans not to get complacent or grow "tired and timid." He recalled...

Scott McClellan Reveals That Gannon/Guckert Got GOPUSA Press Pass By Joe Strupp Published: February 18, 2005 5:20 PM ET NEW YORK Former Talon News reporter James Guckert obtained his first White House press credentials as a representative of the pro-Republican Web site, GOPUSA, not as a Talon News reporter, as previously believed, Press Secretary Scott McClellan told E&P today. McClellan said White House Press Office staffers considered the obviously partisan site to be a legitimate news organization when they gave Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon, the first of numerous day passes in February 2003. "He faxed a letter in on his...

Prof. Bainbridge whacks Joe Conason for trying to make and even bigger deal out of the Gannon story. On that point: I'm still getting email from left-wing sites or the people who read them about what a huge deal the Gannon story is. I'm starting to feel the same way I do when I look at one of those posters with all the tiny dots which if you look at the right way you can see space ships or unicorns or whatever, because I just can't see it. Nothing anybody has said has made this come into focus for me....

San Antonio radio producer Susan Farris could always count on James Guckert, a.k.a. former White House correspondent Jeff Gannon, to pitch an appearance on the shows she produces at conservative talk station KTSA. He was not only anxious about pushing his story of the day, but seemed to always have some kind of inside knowledge about the White House, as well. "I said, 'How do you have such great sources?' and he just laughed it off," she told E&P Friday. "Now we all know how." Farris, who has worked in San Antonio radio for more than a decade, said she...