Blogger Powers, Activate
One night SFist was watching the Daily Show when we noticed Jon snarking on the questions of a White House Reporter. In a news conference just after Bush’s election, a reporter asked a question so patently softball that it didn’t even qualify as softball, more like t-ball. The question was asked by one Jeff Gannon, "White House Correspondent" for the Talon News Service. Turns out the guy’s been a little on the famous side for asking those kind of questions, especially during the daily briefings when Scott McClellan had a habit of using him as a life-line to help him out of troubled waters.
So the left-wing bloggers, with Berkeley’s own Daily Kos leading the way, did some digging. They found out that Talon News Service is pretty much a house organ of the Republican Party and not a legitimate news company. It also turns out that most of his questions were right out of Republican Talking Points. What, the White House planting some fake reporter to ask easy questions to help the President? This White House? They never manage stage events, lie to the press, or pay reporters to say things. Don’t you know the President loves Freedom? Anyhoo, some more digging was done and some other things were discovered about Mr. Gannon. Things like he had no experience as a journalist. Or that somehow this guy was one of a few people who were handed the oh-so-secret Valerie Plame CIA memo that caused such a raucous way back when. Oh, and that the guy might also be running a gay porn Web site and possible gay escort service.
In fact, if you look at the profile of the purported Mr. Gannon that some enterprising person discovered online (and his since been taken down) you might even think that Mr. Gannon might be Mr. Big Gay Jeff Gannon.
We know- how Red State can you get?
To get into the who's and what’s of it all would take SFist far too much time to get into. Needless to say that digging around on this stuff is way more fun than debating type fonts. Gannon, who really goes by the name Jim Guckert, resigned today, supposedly due to "death threats" he’s received for his investigate reporting, and all of his columns have been pulled from the Talon News Web sites. The mainstream press is starting get all over this too, although we don’t know if they’ll be bringing up the ass f------- part.
If you want to catch up on the hype, Daily Kos is here. AmericaBlog has also been all over it today, as has Atrios and World O’Crap. Faux Wonkette has also been all over the story, drooling over every photo and every lascivious detail. Of course, it goes without saying that while the hypocrisy of all this might be funnest part of all, the fact that all of this went down underneath the noses of the White Press Corps should be the really scary thing. Just one more blow against the Mainstream Media we'd say and yet another score for the bloggers. Yay us!