From The Washington Post, 2/18/05:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A35093-2005Feb18.html
The Scandal That Keeps on Giving
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, February 18, 2005; 12:37 PM
The story of the phony White House reporter who called himself Jeff
Gannon just gets curiouser and curiouser every day -- and shows no
sign of abating.
Quite the contrary, in fact.
After only occasionally burbling out of the realm of bloggers and
media watchers over the past few weeks, the story exploded onto
network television last night.
And after a few days in which the chatter was fixated on the salacious
associations that bloggers uncovered between James D. Guckert
(Gannon's real name) and gay escort Web sites, the focus is back on a
serious public policy question:
Why was a non-journalist asking slanted non-questions welcomed into
the White House Briefing room?
Here's Brian Williams, introducing the story to about 10-million-plus
people last night on the NBC Nightly News:
"It is the talk of Washington these days. It involves a man who was a
regular in the White House press briefing room, he was free to ask
President Bush and his press secretary on a regular basis. But it
turns out he wasn't really a journalist and wasn't using his real name
-- and there is more to his past that is making a lot of people wonder
what he was doing in the White House in the first place."
The NBC report then quotes journalism ethics lecturer Kelly McBride
asking:
"Was he a plant? Was he a ringer? It's a great question, and that has
yet to be answered."
And now it turns out that Guckert did initially raise eyebrows in the
White House press office -- but that any qualms were quickly waved
off, and Guckert then kept on getting waved in.
Joe Strupp writes in Editor & Publisher:
"Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer was so concerned
about Talon News reporter James Guckert's potential ties to the
Republican Party that he stopped calling on him at press briefings for
about a week in 2003, Fleischer told E&P today.
" 'I found out that he worked for a GOP site, and I didn't think it
was my place to call on him because he worked for something that was
related to the party,' Fleischer said in a phone interview. 'He had
the editor call me and made the case that they were not related to the
Republican Party. He said they used the GOP name for marketing
purposes only.'
"He said he resumed calling on Guckert, who used the alias Jeff
Gannon, after Bobby Eberle, owner of both GOPUSA and Talon News,
'assured me that they were not part of the Republican Party.' Eberle
is a Texas Republican activist and served as a delegate to the 2000
Republican National Convention."
Strupp asked Fleischer if he thinks changes should be made in the
credentialing process be made.
Fleischer replied that "the White House Correspondents Association
should either seek a change or leave it alone and recognize that there
is room for a little weirdness on both sides."
Fleischer also said Guckert was "just as legitimate as some of the
fringe organizations in the room."
Another new wrinkle:
It appears Guckert was cleared into the briefing room even before his
alleged news organization existed.
Eric Boehlert in Salon writes:
"Thanks to the continued digging by online sleuths, there's now
documented evidence that Guckert attended White House briefings as
early as February 2003.
Guckert, using his alias 'Jeff Gannon,' once boasted online about
asking then-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer a question at
the Feb. 28, 2003, briefing.
The date is significant because in order to receive a White House
press pass, Guckert would have needed to prove that he worked for a
news organization that, in the words of White House press secretary
Scott McClellan, 'published regularly,' in itself an extraordinarily
low threshold.
Critics have charged that while Talon News may publish regularly, it
boasts a nearly all-volunteer news team that includes not a single
person with actual journalism experience.
(The team does, though, have quite a bit of experience working on
Republican campaigns.)
In other words, the outfit is not legitimate or independent, two
criteria often used in Washington to receive press credentials.
"But what's significant about the February 2003 date is that Talon did
not even exist then."
Keith Olbermann of MSNBC writes in his blog:
"Today, the key, slim, rationale for his admittance to the briefing
room -- that the 'vanity website' for which he 'reported,' Talon News,
was created four days before 'Jeff Gannon' got his first White House
pass -- collapsed. . . .
"It was a bad enough that somebody let in a guy with no media
experience, an alias, and a background as an on-line escort -- but why
did they let him in if he wasn't even pretending to represent a news
organization of any kind?"
______________________________________________________
Harry
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