Check your media lap dogs, Mr. President

[Jon8503]

Published February 20, 2005 by Clarence Page of the Chicago Tribune


WASHINGTON -- If America's mainstream media really were as liberal as conservatives claim we are, we would be ballyhooing the fiasco of James D. Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon, with Page 1 banner headlines and hourly bulletins.

Sure, Guckert-gate may seem like a tempest in a teapot, at first. But so did the Whitewater land-development deal. Yet conservative commentators and editorialists, aided by their allies in Congress, rode that Arkansas pony until it ended far afield from a land deal with the impeachment of a president for lying about sex.

Imagine, then, how the conservative choir would sing out at this point if a Democratic White House knocked long-tenured journalists off its press room access lists so that it could give access to a fellow like Guckert, 47, who dependably asks softball questions because he reports for a partisan Web site that supports the Bush administration.

Imagine how they would question the access given by the Secret Service and the White House press office for two years to a guy who used a driver's license that said James Guckert to get into the White House, then switched to his alter ego of Jeff Gannon. The best explanation for this that Bush's press secretary, Scott McClellan, could give to Editor & Publisher magazine was, "People use aliases all the time in life, from journalists to actors."

Guckert wrote under the name Jeff Gannon for Talon News, a conservative online news outlet associated with GOPUSA, a conservative Web site based in Houston and dedicated to "spreading the conservative message throughout America."

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