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Date: Tue, 08 Mar 2005 10:11:11 -0000
Subject: Konformist: "Jeff Gannon" PT 1




Please send as far and wide as possible.

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Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com

BuzzFlash.com
February 5, 2005

BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the Week: Jeff Gannon

Welcome back to the BuzzFlash.com GOP Hypocrite of the Week.

Since the White House news conferences are really staged public
relations events, maybe having a partisan right wing shill in the
group is not really hypocrisy. After all, if the rare appearances of
Bush before the press are really just orchestrated according to
script, having a guy like Jeff Gannon, of the low-profile
Republican "Talon News Service" isn't hypocrisy, it's just part of
the plan.

Talon's only other contribution to the world is an obscure website
called GOPUSA.com, with a mission to "...spread the conservative
message throughout America." Well, that explains a lot.

But last week at a Bush press conference, Gannon outdid himself by
turning an ironically Orwellian editorial comment into a partisan set-
up for Bush.

Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak
picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-
NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-
NY] 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've said you
are going to reach out to these people -- how are you going to work
with people who seem to have diivorced themselves from reality?

Apparently, Rush Limbaugh took credit for Gannon's question to Bush.

Gannon insists he's a real reporter, but the media watchdog group,
Media Matters, says "Talon appears to be little more than an arm of
the Republican Party." And Gannon has been denied credentials by the
Capitol Press Office because Talon doesn't qualify as a professional
news source.

Gannon's website leaves little doubt that he comes from the right
wing Gordon Liddy school of bullet head commentary. Biographical
background on Gannon that no longer is on the Talon website indicated
that "He is also a graduate of the Leadership Institute Broadcast
School of Journalism."

And what might that be? Well the Institute website tells us, "The
Leadership Institute ... is the oldest and most-respected training
organization for conservative leaders." They say they've turned out
over 40,000 wingnuts just like Gannon, which goes a long way to
explain what's wrong with cable news.

So in addition to taxpayer-funded payola for conservative
journalists, phony news video releases in support of the Bushevik
policies, psy-op journalism operations, "leaked" lies to Bush
sympathizers like Judith Miller of the NYT, the "All Republican, All
the Time" propaganda news channel known as FOX News, and a largely
fawning and braindead corporate press, we now know about the right
wing activists ginning up the scripted Bush public relations
appearances. You know the ones that under previous administrations
were actually news conferences.

Jeff Gannon is our BuzzFlash GOP Hypocrite of the week because his
role at the White House news conferences is not to get information;
it is to make Bush look good. He's part of the script.

While, at the same time, Helen Thomas is exiled to a back row because
she has the temerity to seek out the truth.

We're betting Gannon, for the softball partisan questions he lobs to
the Emperor with No Clothes, gets a front row seat so he can quickly
kneel down and thank Karl Rove for putting him there.

Until next week, just remember our motto at BuzzFlash.com: So many
Republican hypocrites, so little time.

Catch up with you soon.

*****

Hidden Angle
February 10, 2005
Out Come the Talons
CJRDaily.com

As you likely know by now, critics of the White House press corps
don't have "Jeff Gannon" to kick around anymore. Gannon, whose real
name is James D. Guckert, quit his post at the conservative Talon
News, a website operated by a Texas Republican Party operative, after
coming under fire for recycling White House press releases into
stories and lobbing softball questions at President Bush during news
conferences. The most recent and arguably most egregious of Gannon's
questions included the false assertion that "Harry Reid was talking
about soup lines," something Gannon came to believe because of a joke
on Rush Limbaugh's radio show, and concluded with the line, "How are
you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves
from reality?" He asked the question without a hint of irony.

Spurred by the controversy, left-wing bloggers dug in and discovered
that Gannon had registered domain names like hotmilitarystud.com.
They defended their exposure of Gannon by pointing out that Talon
News has run articles questioning what it refers to as "the
homosexual agenda." "He has been extremely anti-gay in his writings,"
said Markos Moulitsas, who runs the Daily Kos blog. "He's been a
shill for the Christian right. So there's a certain level of
hypocrisy there that I thought was fair game and needed to be called
out." Conservatives, for their part, argue that the real hypocrites
are on the left, who are "[savaging] someone for possibly being gay,"
as redstate.org's Krempasky put it.

Krempasky is obviously wrong here -- charging someone with hypocrisy
doesn't automatically add up to homophobia -- but Moulitsas isn't in
the clear eithher. There's nothing that enrages partisans more than a
hypocrite, and, in their zeal to take down an apparent first-rate one
like Gannon, many liberals were blind to the ethical issues of
exposing his private life. Gannon has every right to be gay and to
aspire to become a pornography peddler (as some of the domain names
he registered suggest) while serving as a GOP shill responsible for
pseudo-journalism with an anti-gay undercurrent. It's not
unreasonable to judge Gannon for apparently holding personal views
that don't square with his public persona. But it is unreasonable to
suggest that somehow his hypocrisy justifies thrusting his personal
life into the public arena. One would think those on the left who
value civil liberties might put a little more stake in one man's
right to privacy.

Gannon's real crime isn't hypocrisy -- it's his contempt for honest
journalism. "I asked a question at a White House press briefing and
this is what happeened to me," Gannon told the Wilmington, Del. News
Journal. "If this is what happens to me, what reporter is safe?" We
know that's a hypothetical, but we'll try to answer it anyway: Real
reporters are safe. It's just the ideological warriors masquerading
as fair-minded journalists who should be wary. Some conservatives
don't see a distinction; according to Glenn Reynolds, "If working for
a biased news organization disqualifies you, a lot of people have a
lot to be worried about. If being involved in a dubious business
venture is disqualifying, I suspect a lot of people have a lot to be
worried about."

But this isn't a media bias issue, no matter how hard you spin it.
(And there isn't much these days that critics won't try to spin as a
media bias issue.) No one, after all, is trying to ban Fox News or
Helen Thomas from the briefing room. Gannon asked questions designed
not to get information from Bush but to demonstrate his allegiance to
him, not to mention his disgust with Democrats and his own ostensible
colleagues. Real journalists, the ones who belong in press
conferences, know that access to a president is a rare gift, and they
know enough not to squander it. Gannon threw away his opportunity in
favor of self-aggrandizing partisan spectacle. He put himself and his
agenda ahead of the public good, and he did it in a manner so
egregious that he left little doubt of his intentions. If both sides
of the debate, blinded by partisan zeal, don't realize that's the
real reason he had to go, they've missed the point.

--Brian Montopoli

*****

February 10, 2005

Gannon or Guckert?
The Perfect Press Plant: He Fit Right In!!
By DAVE LINDORFF
Counterpunch.org

The real question the public should be asking in the l'Affaire "Jeff
Gannon" is not whether or not the White House knew of or was behind
his infiltrating the White House press corps, but why it was so easy
for a Republican shill posing under a false name (he's really James
Guckert) as a journalist to last so long hiding out among the members
of the legit White House press corps., and why it took bloggers to
expose him.

The answer is that his puffball questioning of the president was not
that different from the questions that are routinely asked by the
mainstream reporters in that gaggle of fine suits and well-coifed
hair.

Anyone who watched the press crew at the staged session back in 2003
when Bush announced his invasion of Iraq would have to agree that
there is little difference between the reporters for our so-called
Fourth Estate and this poseur. Instead of questions about why the
U.S. would be invading a country that posed no threat and that had
not attacked or threatened to attack America, and about how this
enormous diversion of military resources would affect the hunt for
Osama Bin Laden, reporters asked the president about his faith and
family! Not only that--the legitimate press corps allowed the White
House to decide in advance which reporters would get to ask
questions, after first requiring them to submit their questions in
writing. Uppity members of the group, including Helen Thomas, were
forced to go to the back of the room behind the potted palms.

In a group of real reporters, Gannon would have stood out like a sore
thumb, but there aren't too many real reporters operating in
Washington these days.

Just getting to the point where you can be trusted with a plum
Washington reporting assignment requires so much boot and ass licking
in the corporate media, so much compromise and selling-out of basic
journalistic principles, that it's a wonder any decent reporting gets
done at all.

As I.F. Stone explained many years ago, the culture of Washington is
so much built around the party circuit and concepts of "access" that
most big-league reporters end up being chums with the people whose
feet they should be holding to the fire. (It's hard to look under
rocks if you're standing on them sipping cocktails.)

Of course, Stone was talking about the press as it was in the early
1970s. Things have gotten much worse now. Back then you didn't have a
network like Fox that is simply a PR organ for the administration,
and many newspapers still were not media conglomerates more worried
about their licensed TV holdings and their good relations with the
Federal Communications Commission than with digging up the news.

What I keep wondering is why the Bush administration has gone to such
incredible, unprecedented and unprincipled lengths to control the
media spin. We now know that they hired at least three journalists
under the table to write favorable articles about Bush education
policy, Bush social policy and Bush war policy, and no doubt these
three are just the tip of a huge iceberg. We know that they put out
fake news reports which they managed to get aired on regular TV news
programs as though they had been generated by a real news
organization. We know that they at least tried to set up--and
probably secretly have set up--a department of disinformation in the
Pentagon to create and distribute fake newss globally. And we know now
too, that they inserted a shill into White House press briefings to
manipulate the coverage of the president and his policies.

And yet they've been getting such airbrushed coverage ever since 9/11
from the mainstream press you have to wonder what they were worried
about. Heck, most of the mainstream media hasn't even reported on
this latest outrage!

The other thing I keep wondering is why the public isn't up in arms
about all this deception and fraud (all accomplished, I might add, at
taxpayer expense). Just imagine, for a moment, if any one of these
things had been done by the Clinton administration.

Dave Lindorff is the author of Killing Time: an Investigation into
the Death Row Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal. His new book of CounterPunch
columns titled "This Can't be Happening!" is published by Common
Courage Press. Information about both books and other work by
Lindorff can be found at www.thiscantbehappening.net.

He can be reached at: [log in to unmask]

*****

A hireling, a fraud and a prostitute
Bush's agent in the press corps has given spin a new level of meaning
Sidney Blumenthal
Thursday February 17, 2005
The Guardian

The White House press room has often been a cockpit of intrigue,
duplicity and truckling. But nothing challenges the most recent
scandal there.
The latest incident began with a sequence of questions for President
Bush at his January 26 press conference. First, he was asked whether
he approved of his administration's payments to conservative
commentators. Government contracts had been granted to three pundits,
who had tried to keep the funding secret. "There needs to be a nice,
independent relationship between the White House and the press," said
the president as he called swiftly on his next questioner.

Jeff Gannon, Washington bureau chief of Talon News, rose from his
chair to attack Democrats in the Congress. "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?"

For almost two years, in the daily White House press briefings Gannon
had been called upon by press secretary Scott McClellan to break up
difficult questioning from the rest of the press. On Fox News, one
host hailed him as "a terrific Washington bureau chief and White
House correspondent". Gannon was frequently quoted and highlighted as
an expert guest on rightwing radio shows. But who was Gannon? His
strange non-question to the president inspired inquiry. Talon News is
a wholly-owned subsidiary of a group of Texas Republicans. Gannon's
most notable article had asserted that John Kerry "might some day be
known as 'the first gay President'".

Gannon also got himself entangled in the investigation into the
criminal disclosure of the identity of covert CIA operative Valerie
Plame. Plame is the wife of former ambassador Joseph Wilson, who was
sent by the Bush administration to discover whether Saddam Hussein
was procuring uranium in Niger for nuclear weapons. He learned that
the suspicion was bogus; appalled that the administration lied about
nuclear WMD to justify the Iraq war, he wrote an article in the New
York Times about his role after the war.

In retaliation, Plame's CIA cover was blown by administration
officials. Gannon had called up Wilson to ask him about a secret CIA
memo supposedly proving that his wife had sent him on the original
mission to Niger, prompting the special prosecutor in the case to
question Gannon about his "sources".

His real name, it turned out, is James Dale Guckert. He has no
journalistic background whatsoever. His application for a press
credential to cover the Congress was rejected. But at the White House
the press office arranged for him to be given a new pass every single
day, a deliberate evasion of the regular credentialing that requires
an FBI security check. It was soon revealed. "Gannon" owned and
advertised his services as a gay escort on more than half a dozen
websites with names like Militarystud.com, MaleCorps.com,
WorkingBoys.net and MeetLocalMen.com, which featured dozens of
photographs of "Gannon" in dramatic naked poses. One of the sites was
still active this week.

Thus a phony journalist, planted by a Republican organisation, used
by the White House press secretary to interrupt questions from the
press corps, protected from FBI vetting by the press office,
disseminating smears about its critics and opponents, some of them
gay-baiting, was unmasked not only as a hireling and fraud but as a
gay prostitute, with enormous potential for blackmail.

The Bush White House is the most opaque - allowing the least access
for reporters - in living memory. Every news organisation has been
intimidated, and reporters who have done stories the administration
finds discomfiting have received threats about their careers. The
administration has its own quasi-official state TV network in Fox
News; hundreds of rightwing radio shows, conservative newspapers and
journals and internet sites coordinate with the Republican apparatus.

Inserting an agent directly into the White House press corps was a
daring operation. Until his exposure, he proved useful for the White
House. But the longer-term implication is the Republican effort to
sideline an independent press and undermine its legitimacy. "Spin"
seems quaint. "In this day and age," said press secretary McClellan,
waxing philosophical about the Gannon affair, "when you have a
changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and
choose who is a journalist." It is not that the White House press
secretary cannot distinguish who is or is not a journalist; it is
that there are no journalists, just the gaming of the system for the
concentration of power.

· Sidney Blumenthal is former senior adviser to President Clinton and
author of The Clinton Wars

[log in to unmask]

*****

The Manchurian Beefcake
By Terry Pinder
Published: Thursday, February 17, 2005
TheSnapper.com

Poor Jeff Gannon. Oh, sorry, poor James Guckert. Or whatever his name
really is.

If you hadn't heard, a partisan operative with no background in
journalism who plagerized RNC press releases as his own stories for
his not-so-legitimate news service was allowed access to the White
House Press Briefings, providing a lifeline for Press Secretary Scott
McClellan and making it difficult for other reporters to get answers
to serious questions. He also had access to information regarding the
Valerie Plame case, a CIA agent who had her identity exposed to
discredit her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson (who, if you remember,
discredited the 16 words that got us into our current war in Iraq).
There's more though.

Gannon, I mean Guckert or whatever his name is, a conservative who
wrote quite a few anti-gay articles for his news organization Talon
News, owns the domains to several sites promoting gay military
prostitution. One site hosted at has a "come-hither" shot of Gannon,
err...Guckert in his underwear. Later investigations showed that
Gannon/Guckert truely was an "escort," with ads on several sites
showing a whole lot more than just "come-hither." An escort is
bascially a legal term to get around the very illegal occupation of
prostitution. He also owes the state of Delaware over $20,000.
Internet bloggers dug this one up by accident as they were just
trying to figure out why someone with a psedonym had access to the
White House when other members of the media had to use their real
names.

Perhaps he is an opportunist looking to "get some homos" in the
military fired from the defense of this great nation. If that's the
case, he's one evil little operative. However, and I think this is
much more likely, Guckert/Gannon/whatever his name is, is probably
gay and he just got outed. I don't feel the least bit sorry for him.
He wrote anti-gay stories for his news service (all his stories,
incidentally, have been scrubbed from the Talon News website) when he
was probably gay all along. I don't care that he might be gay and is
a conservative. There are many gay conservative Americans who vote
Republican and for the president and there are many of that same
subset who are serving this great nation in the military. I'm also
not that bothered that he sold sex for cash. However, Gannon is a
hypocrite because of who he shilled for and what hateful things he
wrote. That bothers me therefore I have very little pity for the man.

So to recap, fake journalist and partisan plagerizer operative (and
now confirmed "escort") using fake name when the rest of the Press
Corp, especially married women, must use their real (and married)
names is given day-to-day access to White House Press Briefings and
had access to classified CIA information and probably played a
pivotal role in the exposure of a CIA agent who worked to stop
weapons of mass destruction proliferation. Oh, he's a prostitute and
a tax cheat. It's clear to see what the media will focus on.

The story here is not that Gannon/Guckert/whatever is a prostitute
and tax cheat. The story is 1. He penetrated White House Security
with a fake name and asked softball questions of the press secretary
and the president. 2. He had access to classified information
regarding Valerie Plame that very few had access to and he may have
had a hand in exposing her to discredit her husband. Given that the
leak regarding Ms. Plame came directly from someone highly placed in
the White House it doesn't take a stretch of the imagination that
Gannon/Guckert, who couldn't even get House and Senate credentials
yet managed to get White House Credentials under a pseudonym, had
some kind of involvment other than "journalistic."

There probably won't be an investigation even though there have been
calls for it. Gannon has quit Talon News and gone on the media
circuit crying about how his life was ruined. There should be an
investigation. For one thing, this man couldn't even get Senate and
House credentials yet was able to get White House credentials. Given
his background you have to ask how the Secret Service dropped the
ball on this one. For another, he probably was a part of the exposure
of an undercover CIA agent, which actually is a federal offense. The
private businesses that he ran on his own, although technically
illegal, aren't really a story. Something else is up here and I
believe the American people are owed some answers.

Terry Pinder is a senior geography major.








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