Before the certification of "Jeff Gannon" as a WH reporter there was... [View All]

[BigBearJohn]

the Bush Administration's de-certification move against the Washington press. These two things are deeply related.

"Jeff Gannon" (really James Dale Guckert) can be thought of as the replacement press, a fake journalist with a fake name working for a fake news organization, asking fake questions at a real press event. Until he asked one of President Bush that showed "unusually blatant sycophancy," as the New Yorker's Hendrick Hertzberg wrote.

This tipped off the bloggers and the online troops of column left, and the investigation of Gannon and Talon News, his fake employer, began. See this summary from Media Citizen, this resource from Daily Kos, this background from Media Matters, this page of reports from Salon.

But also see Stuck at the Gates by Jon Garfunkel, showing how blogger Eileen Smith of Oregon began an effort in February 2004 to investigate Gannon, which alerted Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post. But until January of this year the story didn't go anywhere, even though Smith had asked about Gannon's credentials, and begged the bigger blogs to look into it. The look is happening now. See the new blog Propagannon, devoted entirely to the investigation.

Tom Tomorrow in his comic strip This Modern World has the outrageousness of it exactly right. I also like Brian Montopoli's description of what "Jeff Gannon" did with his moment in the national spotlight, from CJR Daily:

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.



See: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/02/25/wht_prss.html