Getting the bad guys (Gannon) with out a majority (WAPOST)

[julialnyc]

"I was given no special information by the White House or by anybody else, for that matter," he told Cooper.


But Paul Harris writes in the Observer: "Suddenly, his 'softball' questions to White House officials looked less like eccentricities and more like plotting by an administration which has frequently displayed a dark mastery of the arts of press control."


Dotty Lynch writes for CBS News that "the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable."


Hendrik Hertzberg writes in the New Yorker: "The non-Fox cable news outlets began to pick up on it last week; MSNBC even assayed a special logo, 'Gannongate.' A better name for it, though, would be 'Nothinggate,' because nothing is what is likely to come of it. What all the memorable scandals of the past thirty years -- real and fake alike, from Watergate to the Clinton impeachment -- have had in common is that the opposition party controlled at least one house of Congress, which gave it the power to hold hearings and issue subpoenas. If Bush ends up having an easier time of it in his second term than any of his two-term predecessors since F.D.R., it won't be because the scandals aren't there. It'll be because the tools to excavate them are under lock and key."


Joe Strupp writes in Editor & Publisher that Guckert "obtained his first White House press credentials as a representative of the pro-Republican Web site, GOPUSA, not as a Talon News reporter, as previously believed, Press Secretary Scott McClellan told E&P today.


"McClellan said White House Press Office staffers considered the openly partisan site to be a legitimate news organization when they gave Guckert, a.k.a. Jeff Gannon, the first of numerous day passes in February 2003."


Ralph Blumenthal writes in the New York Times that Guckert's former boss denies that Guckert was an administration plant or was given preferential treatment.


Blumenthal also spoke to Guckert. "Asked why he did not, in his function as a White House reporter, even try to interview White House officials, he said, 'I thought there was a lot of meat that came out of the press briefings.


" 'You may say that lacks some kind of journalistic ambition,' he added."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A44219-2005Feb22.html?nav=rss_politics/administration/whbriefing