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WH Reporter, Jeff Gannon:
male prostitute
The Raw Story
HARD JOURNALISM
Real questions about Gannon
February, 2004
Over the past few weeks, quite the scandal has blown up around
a "reporter' known for asking particularly
Republican-friendly questions in the White House Press Room. The
reporter, who went by the name of Jeff Gannon, is actually named
James Guckert, and worked for an organization called Talon News.
(For ease of identification, I will refer to him as
"Gannon.') After Gannon was linked with several gay
websites, he resigned from the notoriously anti-gay Talon, and
many of his stories have been pulled from the site. The mess
triggered issues that range across the political spectrum, from
salacious details of his involvement with the gay escort business
to questions of the White House's relationship with the
press.
Over the past few weeks, quite the scandal has blown up around
a "reporter' known for asking particularly
Republican-friendly questions in the White House Press Room. The
reporter, who went by the name of Jeff Gannon, is actually named
James Guckert, and worked for an organization called Talon News.
(For ease of identification, I will refer to him as
"Gannon.') After Gannon was linked with several gay
websites, he resigned from the notoriously anti-gay Talon, and
many of his stories have been pulled from the site. The mess
triggered issues that range across the political spectrum, from
salacious details of his involvement with the gay escort business
to questions of the White House's relationship to the
press.
The first, and by far the most sensational, is the revelation
that not only was Gannon connected with several websites for gay
male escorts through his business (in an interview with Wolf
Blitzer, Gannon insisted that he had merely been contracted as a
software consultant for sites that never even made it online),
but that Gannon was listed on several
websites—MaleCorps.com, WorkingBoys.net, and
MeetLocalMen.com—as a male escort himself, complete with
prices and pictures. John Aravosis, of AmericaBlog.org, not only
tracked down Gannon's profiles on such sites, but located
(and linked to) dozens of photos of Gannon in various stages of
undress from the profiles.
The question of whether a reporter's sex life, even as a
prostitute, is really relevant to the main issues with the entire
affair is a relatively easy one—clearly, the sexual life
(or career) of a reporter isn't the business of the White
House. But in this entertaining new twist on sexual scandal,
after having endured years and millions of our taxpayer dollars
down the drain of a special prosecutor's sexual witch-hunt
those of us on the left side of the aisle cannot help but
experience a frisson of schadenfreude.
A clearly more relevant concern with Gannon's status is
how exactly a fake reporter with a false identity was able to
obtain access to the White House Press Room. Virtually all
reporters who regularly cover the President and administration
obtain a "hard pass' to the White House. This
essentially works like an employee pass in a particularly
security-conscious office—they swipe their pass as they
enter, and the Secret Service searches whatever bags they bring
in. To achieve this status and convenience, the reporter must
undergo a stringent security check: he or she must show that she
works for a legitimate news organization, lives in the Washington
metropolitan area, requires regular access to the White House to
fulfill their reporting duties, and is accredited by the Standing
Committee of Correspondents to cover Capitol Hill. After all of
these requirements have been satisfied, the Secret Service
performs a background check on the reporter, and only after the
background check is completed does the reporter receive his or
her hard pass to the White House.
The alternative to entering with a hard pass is using a day
pass, which involves a much lower level of proof that the
reporter works for a news organization and a very abbreviated
security check (the applicant must only provide his or her name,
social security number, and date of birth). Note that the
requirement is only that one works for "a news
organization,' not "a legitimate news
organization'—the significance is illustrated nicely
by Gannon's own circumstances. He did apply for a
credential from the Standing Committee of Correspondents, the
first step towards obtaining a hard pass, but after the
organization noticed that the Talon was owned by Bobby Eberle,
one of the owners of GOPUSA (an organization that is pretty much
just what it sounds like, and which Gannon also wrote for), the
committee asked for more information on the Talon to show that it
was an independent news organization and not essentially a
Republican press office. The Talon and Gannon never responded to
the committee, so in absence of any such evidence, the committee
denied Gannon's accreditation.
And so Gannon's daily visits to the White House utilized
a day pass every time. There used to be a more official system of
regular day passes, known as the "card index,' that
was traditionally used by reporters covering a specific issue or
reporters on a relatively short-term assignment to the White
House. After September 11, however, the Secret Service decided
that giving regular access to the White House with such an
abbreviated security check was not safe, and discontinued the
practice.
This is where the third and most serious issue connected with
the Gannon mess comes into play. Why was Gannon, a person using a
false identity and lacking the most rudimentary press credentials
permitted to easily and regularly gain access to the White House
Press Room? The Bush administration has demonstrated a profoundly
disturbing commitment to blurring the lines between propaganda
and objective news. This commitment goes completely beyond the
White House's routine friendliness to reporters from Fox
News or the Pax network—the administration has filmed press
clips with actors and sent them out to news stations as
legitimate reportage and paid commentators to argue for White
House policy proposals without revealing that they were
compensated to do so. Now, like con men using a ringer, the
President's staff has enabled, if not endorsed, fake
reporters taking up residence in the White House press pool to
toss softball questions designed to make a press conference look
like the O'Reilly Factor.
Consider some of Gannon's past questions, as recounted
(and replayed) on Keith Olbermann's MSNBC show:
May 10: "In your denunciations of the Abu Ghraib photos,
you've used words like 'sickening,' 'disgusting' and
'reprehensible.' Will you have any adjectives left to adequately
describe the pictures from Saddam's rape rooms and torture
chambers? And will Americans ever see those images?'
July 15: "Doesn't Joe Wilson owe the President and
America an apology for his deception and his own intelligence
failure? "(Wilson asserted, and still does, that his wife
Valerie Plame, exposed as a CIA operative by Bob Novak, was not
responsible for his assignment to Niger to investigate the claims
that Iraq tried to buy yellowcake enriched uranium from the
country. It has been conclusively proven that Wilson's
assessment that the rumors were unfounded was correct.)
And my personal favorite, from back in February: "Since
there have been so many questions about what the President was
doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his
honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches
alongside Jane Fonda, denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam?
Did he testify before Congress that American troops committed war
crimes in Vietnam? And did he throw somebody else's medals at the
White House to protest a war America was still
fighting?'
One expects to hear scripted drivel like that on a late night
"informercial,' which is designed to delude
insomniacs into purchasing useless products. One also expects
that dictators like the monsters who head countries in the
"axis of evil' will manipulate the media to create an
illusion of news coverage that is in reality a tissue of lies.
One doesn't expect the leader of the free world, the man
who has promised to shine the light of freedom into all the dark
recesses of tyranny (Uzbekistan, anyone?), to hire shills
masquerading as reporters. Gannon couldn't get a regular
press pass because he couldn't conceal that he worked for
an explicitly Republican organization, yet he received special
attention from the administration allowing him to treat the
Secret Service's security check like his own personal coat
check. Press Secretary Scott McClellan has acknowledged that
Gannon was cleared for his perpetual day pass under his real
name, and that McClellan himself knew that his real name was
Guckert.
Filling the press pool seats with party operatives is not how
the Fourth Estate is supposed to do its job, and ensuring that
not even the Press Secretary has to answer anyone but ringers
from his own party's extremist wing simply demonstrates one
more time that this White House seems to have a congenital fear
of ever having to interact with someone who doesn't carry a
Republican membership card.
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