When it rains exposed hacks, it sure pours exposed hacks! First there was Armstrong Williams, the dimwit who took money from the Bush administration to push its education policies on TV and in his columns. Then there was Maggie Gallagher, the one-time single mom who believes everyone should be made to marry—except for gays, who should be prevented from doing so through a constitutional amendment—and who was paid to write administration policy on the subject for government brochures while hawking herself as an independent pundit. Gallagher was followed by Michael McManus, an 'Ethics and Religion' columnist who wasn't being ethical when he took money from the Bush administration, though he did it religiously.
The latest 'journalist' with a curious relationship to the White House is James Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, who wrote antigay screeds and gay-baited John Kerry—possibly the first 'gay president,' he said in one of his leading questions during press conference—but who now looks to have been associated with gay-hustler-themed Web sites while mysteriously gaining access to daily White House briefings.
To listen to the arrogant and suddenly pious anchors and reporters of the corporate press corps—who've hardly been guardians of privacy in recent years—it's all just so unseemly. The hand-wringing over liberal bloggers' supposed revelations about the fake White House reporter's 'personal life' has been comical; and no matter what they say, it certainly does not reflect any newfound regard for privacy. It looks more like the media got beat, again, on a story that was sitting right under their noses. Playing catch up, they had to create a back-story that also acted as an alibi.
Like bratty kids made to eat their greens, CNN, the Washington Post, New York Times and other news organizations were eventually forced to report on how a fraud using a false name and working for a right-wing Web site owned by a Republican Party operative in Texas—Talon News—gained access to daily White House press briefings for two years. Guckert even appears to have seen or known about ( he declined to tell Editor & Publisher ) a memo that outed Valerie Plame, Ambassador Joe Wilson's wife, as an undercover CIA agent.
Guckert's escapades came to light only because liberal Web sites and blogs shined a bright light on him. David Brock's site, Media Matters for America ( MediaMatters.org ) , pointed to the guy's habit of plagiarizing material from Republican press releases. Daily Kos and Atrios were also on the case, looking into his phony name, his background and how he was often called upon by Spokesman Scott McClellan, seemingly to deflect attention. At first, the corporate press was silent. This possibly served to embolden Gannon, who actually dared the bloggers to come and get him, writing on his own Web site, JeffGannon.com, that he was 'hiding in plain sight.'
But soon the blogs revealed that a company Gannon owned also ran Web sites with military gay-hustler themes, including hotmilitarystud.com and militaryescortsm4m.com . A photo of Guckert in his America Online profile surfaced, showing him in only his briefs and military dog tags, suggestively positioned in a 'let's fuck' pose, above the caption, 'Still sexy after all these years.' Within hours, Guckert announced on his Web site that his 'voice' was now 'silent,' and that he had resigned from Talon News. Talon scrubbed their site of anything to do with the guy. That's when the corporate press was forced to cover this story, choosing to portray it as one in which liberal bloggers—as opposed to the 'responsible' media—went overboard.
On CNN, the Washington Post's Howard Kurtz asked Wolf Blitzer, if these 'liberal bloggers' went 'too far ... in dragging in some of this personal stuff.'
Of course, Kurtz thought the answer was a resounding Yes, even though the Web sites suggested a connection to the prostitution of military personnel, something Kurtz failed to mention. On CNN's Newsnight, Aaron Brown, who often romanticizes the 'craft' of journalism, seemed to be grasping for ways to excuse his and other news organizations for not reporting on a guy who had been in their midst for two years. The first question he asked John Aravosis of Americablog, which was at the forefront of exposing Gannon, was: 'There is, I think here, a kind of 'so what' quality. Here's this guy, everyone knows what he is, the only people honestly who read the Web site are people who believe what he believes to begin with. So why the fuss?'
Brown also floated the White House line that White House staffers don't decide who gets into the White House briefings, to which Aravosis simply replied, 'That is the biggest bunch of hogwash I've ever heard.' We know how much this White House controls press briefing and who asks questions. Brown also lamented, ' [ there's ] something a little unseemly about the way ... people went after this guy's personal life.' Aravosis cut through that one too, noting that the Web sites—which Guckert himself told CNN were sites he created for clients when he was trying to launch a software company—were about his 'business' life, not his 'personal' life, and showed a connection to escort services. Brown seemed not to want to go near the Plame angle at all, deciding to end it right there in hopes the story just goes away.
The story, like many, may in fact go away. Or, if Democrats continue to call for investigations ( Sen. Frank Lautenberg demanded records from Mclellan while two Democratic House members demanded the special prosecutor on the Plame case investigate Guckert ) , it may have legs. But why, in addition to the general free ride the media has given Bush on a host of issues, was the press corps so reluctant to go after this story? Because they didn't want to upset the apple cart that is the White House press briefing room.
Just like the Pentagon press briefing room, White House reporters are fed little morsels of information. Anybody who causes trouble—by exposing, say, a White House plant in the room—is going to get punished, and thus be denied access and get scooped by the competition. So someone like Gannon operated among them for two years without being exposed, even though they all knew, and were clearly embarrassed by, the truth.
