I don't have a list of who gets White House press conference
credentials, but someone did, and he investigated who's who.
Looky, looky, looky.
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/02/02/white_hous=
e_friendly_reporter_under_scrutiny/
Who needs a "hard card" (permanent White House pass) when you are
guaranteed to get a daily pass (literally and figurately)?
Bob Dog
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The Boston Globe
White House-friendly reporter under scrutiny
By Charlie Savage and Alan Wirzbicki, Globe Staff and Globe
Correspondent
February 2, 2005
WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has provided White House
media credentials to a man who has virtually no journalistic
background, asks softball questions to the president and his
spokesman in the midst of contentious news conferences, and
routinely reprints long passages verbatim from official press
releases as original news articles on his website.
Jeff Gannon calls himself the White House correspondent for
TalonNews.com, a website that says it is "committed to
delivering accurate, unbiased news coverage to our readers." It
is operated by a Texas-based Republican Party delegate and
political activist who also runs GOPUSA.com, a website that touts
itself as "bringing the conservative message to America."
Called on last week by President Bush at a press conference,
Gannon attacked Democratic Senate leaders and called them
"divorced from reality." During the presidential campaign, when
called on by Press Secretary Scott McClellan, Gannon linked
Senator John F. Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, to Jane Fonda
and questioned why anyone would dispute Bush's National Guard
service.
Now, the question of how Gannon gets into White House press
conferences is coming under intense scrutiny from critics who
contend that Gannon is not a journalist but rather a White House
tool to soften media coverage of Bush. The issue was raised by a
media watchdog group and picked up by Internet bloggers, who
linked Gannon's presence in White House briefings to recent
controversies over whether the administration manipulates the
flow of information to the public.
These include the disclosure that the Education Department
secretly paid columnist Armstrong Williams to promote its
education policy and the administration's practice of sending out
video press releases about its policies that purport to be "news
stories" by fake journalists.
McClellan said Gannon has not been issued -- nor requested -- a
regular "hard pass" to the White House, and instead has come in
for the past two years on daily passes. Daily passes, he said,
may be issued to anyone who writes for an organization that
publishes regularly and who is cleared to enter the building.
He said other reporters and political commentators from lesser-
known newsletters and from across the political spectrum also
attend briefings, though he could not recall any Internet
bloggers. McClellan said it is not the White House's role to
decide who is and who is not a real journalist and dismissed any
notion of conspiracy.
Nonetheless, transcripts of White House briefings indicate that
McClellan often calls on Gannon and that the press secretary --
and the president -- have found relief in a question from Gannon
after critical lines of questioning from mainstream news
organizations.
When Bush called on Gannon near the end of his nationally
televised Jan. 26 news conference, he had just been questioned
about Williams and the Education Department funds, an
embarrassment to the administration. Gannon's question was
different.
"Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of
the US economy," Gannon said. "[Minority Leader] Harry Reid was
talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about
the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same
breath, they say that Social Security is rock solid and there's
no crisis there. How are you going to work -- you said you're
going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work
with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"
As it turned out, Reid had never talked about soup lines. That
was a phrase attributed to him in satire by Rush Limbaugh on his
radio show.
Last year, during the presidential campaign, Gannon's comments
could be even more pointed. In a Feb. 10, 2004, briefing with
McClellan, for example, Gannon rose to deliver the following:
"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?"
David Brock, the former investigative journalist who made his
name revealing aspects of former President Bill Clinton's
extramarital affairs, said he was watching last week's press
conference on television and the "soup lines" question sparked
his interest because it "struck me as so extremely biased." Brock
asked his media watchdog group, Media Matters for America, to
look into Talon News.
It quickly discovered two things, he said. First, both Talon and
the political organization GOP USA were run by a Texas Republican
activist and party delegate named Bobby Eberle. Second, many of
the reports Gannon filed for Talon News "appeared to be lifted
verbatim from various White House and Republican political
committee documents."
Eberle did not return phone calls yesterday, and Gannon declined
to comment. He did reply to Brock's group on his personal blog:
"In many cases I have liberally used the verbiage provided on key
aspects of the issue because it is the precise expression of
where the White House stands -- free of any 'spin.' It's the
ultimate in journalistic honesty -- unvarnished and unfiltered.
If only others would be as forthcoming."
=A9 Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
=20
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