| 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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