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Jeff Gannon, Jim Guckert, and... Prostitution?

 
 
Dookiestix
 
  1  
Reply Thu 3 Mar, 2005 02:21 pm
Jeff Gannon seems to know what Maureen Dowd really needs....Jeff Gannon
VIa War Room

Jeff Gannon just won't go away, and who wants him to, really? His blog is a new must-read -- one-stop-shopping for all things Gannongate and so much more. If you click over right now (jeffgannon.com), for example, you might catch Jim/Jeff explaining what ails Maureen Dowd. His prognosis: The New York Times columnist is a "gal who probably needs a bit of the old Jeff Gannon to relieve some of that pent-up whatever."

It seems that Jimmy/Jeff has a thing for Ann Coulter too...
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Thu 3 Mar, 2005 02:35 pm
Here's that Coulter article you pointed us to .....

Quote:
CALLING THE KETTLE GAY

Wed Mar 2, 6:41 PM ET

By Ann Coulter

It's been a tough year for Democrats. They lost the presidential election, their favorite news outlets have been abjectly humiliated, they had to sit through a smashingly successful election in Iraq (news - web sites), and most painfully, they had to endure unwarranted attacks on a cartoon sponge. So I understand liberals are upset. Let go, let God ... Oops -- I'm talking to liberals! Let go, let Spongebob ...

Democrats tried working out their frustrations on blacks for a while, but someone -- I can't remember who, but it probably wasn't Sen. Robert Byrd (news, bio, voting record) -- must have finally told them it really wasn't helping to keep disparaging every single black person in a position of authority in this Republican administration.

So now liberals are lashing out at the gays. Two weeks ago, The New York Times turned over half of its op-ed page to outing gays with some connection to Republicans. There is no principled or intellectual basis for these outings. Conservatives don't want gays to die; we just don't want to transform the Pentagon (news - web sites) into the Office of Gay Studies.

By contrast, liberals say: "We love gay people! Gay people are awesome! Being gay is awesome! Gay marriage is awesome! Gay cartoon characters are awesome! And if you don't agree with us, we'll punish you by telling everyone that you're gay!"

In addition to an attack on a Web site reporter for supposedly operating a gay escort service and thereby cutting into the business of the Village Voice, another Times op-ed article the same day gratuitously outed the children of prominent conservatives.

These are not public figures. No one knows who they are apart from their famous parents. I didn't even know most of these conservatives had children until the Times outed them.

Liberals can't even cite their usual "hypocrisy" fig leaf to justify the public outings of conservatives' family members. No outsider can know what goes on inside a family, but according to the public version of one family matter being leered over by liberals, a prominent conservative threw his daughter out of the house when he found out she was gay.

Stipulating for purposes of argument that that's the whole story -- which is absurd -- isn't that the opposite of hypocrisy? Wouldn't that be an example of someone sacrificing other values on the mantle of consistency?

Outing relatives of conservatives is nothing but ruthless intimidation: Stop opposing our agenda -- or your kids will get it. This is a behavioral trope of all totalitarians: Force children to testify against their parents to gain control by fear.

It's bad enough when liberals respond to a conservative argument by digging through the conservative's garbage cans; it's another thing entirely when they start digging through the garbage cans of the conservative's family members. (On behalf of conservatives everywhere, I say: Stay out of our gay relatives' cans.)

Liberals use these people and then discard them. Has John Kerry (news - web sites) had lunch with his pal Mary Cheney lately? What ever happened to Newt Gingrich's gay half-sister? Did she have any further insights to impart other than that she was gay?

Already this year, the glorious story of one conservative's gay child has gotten 58 mentions on Lexis-Nexis, including seven shows on CNN (eight if you include "On the Record With Greta Van Susteren") -- and none on Fox News (unless you include "On the Record With Greta Van Susteren").

The 2004 Gay Conservative Offspring story got 29 mentions on Lexis-Nexis, including in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New York Daily News, The International Herald Tribune and five shows on CNN. (This story wasn't as much fun for liberals inasmuch as they were forced to mention that the conservative had adopted the troubled, mixed-race child at age 15, contradicting their earlier claims that the conservative was a racist.) There is not a single mention of this gay poster boy in the Lexis-Nexis archives since the last sadistic mention of him in an article from October 2004. Liberals ruin a family and then moveon.org.

Meanwhile, William J. Murray, the son of prominent atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hair (news - web sites) -- and the named plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that banned school prayer -- came out as a Christian in 1980. There are only two mentions of it in the Lexis-Nexis archives: Facts on File and The Washington Post.

The Lexis-Nexis library for 1980 may be smaller than it is today, but it has articles from major newspapers, which the New York Times was still considered in 1980. (There are, for example, two Times stories mentioning the rumor that Ronald Reagan (news - web sites) dyed his hair in the Lexis-Nexis archives for 1980.) No mention of the son of America's most notorious atheist becoming a Christian.

Two years later, Murray wrote a riveting book about his spiritual transformation from the sordid misery of atheism to Christianity, "My Life Without God." There were only five articles mentioning the book on Lexis-Nexis: four wire services and one article in The Washington Post. None in the Times.

Unlike the gay children of conservatives, who are used as liberal props and then dropped, Murray has remained in the news for decades as a powerful Christian spokesman. Perhaps this is because a spiritual journey from atheism to Christianity is of more intellectual interest than an announcement of one's sexual preference. It's just not as likely to be gloated over in purportedly serious news outlets like CNN or The New York Times. BEGIN ITAL) Let go, let Spongebob ...


http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=108&ncid=742&e=10&u=/ucac/20050302/cm_ucac/callingthekettlegay
0 Replies
 
FreeDuck
 
  1  
Reply Thu 3 Mar, 2005 02:37 pm
yawn
0 Replies
 
Dookiestix
 
  1  
Reply Thu 3 Mar, 2005 02:43 pm
Sigh... Rolling Eyes
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Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Thu 3 Mar, 2005 02:44 pm
<chuckle>
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Dartagnan
 
  1  
Reply Thu 3 Mar, 2005 02:49 pm
The thing about Coulter is, strain though she does, she's never really funny. I can chuckle along with Limbaugh or O'Reilly--I don't agree with much of anything they say, but they're kinda clever sometimes--but Ann has to be the most outrageous one in the room all the time.
0 Replies
 
Cycloptichorn
 
  1  
Reply Thu 3 Mar, 2005 03:33 pm
http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/

Day 4

Quote:
WH Gaggle Watch: Day Four, Midday Update
This is a mid-day update about trying to get a White House daily press pass to cover a briefing. We don't generally do this, but we're having an especially frustrating day.

After three days, we realized this morning that the phone call route wasn't working -- especially since they seem to have stopped answering the phone at the Media Affairs Office. We asked our boss and MediaBistro's editor, Elizabeth Spiers (a "real" journalist for sure), to fax a letter requesting access on our behalf.

No one has answered the phone in the Media Affairs office all day. Because we were initially concerned that Jenny, Caroline, and John had just stopped answering our calls, we tried calling this morning from a different number: No luck. Elizabeth also had no luck calling from her office. What's going on here?

Does anyone have a fax number for the White House Office of Media Affairs? Anyone have any other ideas? Drop us an email: garrett AT mediabistro DOT com.

As an aside and a preview of a larger post for the future, we never meant this to be an absurdist comedy. We really just wanted to cover a briefing--perhaps the most famed journalism institution in the city--and write about the atmosphere. This was supposed to be simple. Everyone we talked to last week said the White House would almost surely grant a pass without much hesitation. It's been four days and we haven't even been able to speak to a person to make our case for covering a briefing. Nothing. Ugg.


Cycloptichorn
0 Replies
 
parados
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 08:53 am
Ann Coulter is like a drunken relative at the family reunion. She's funny at first. Then everyone starts to feel sorry for her pathetic state. Finally everyone avoids her.

I only hope someone on the right has the sense to take her car keys away.

The woman has no logic and her readers seem to have less. Tico, explain this one to me
Quote:
By contrast, liberals say: "We love gay people! Gay people are awesome! Being gay is awesome! Gay marriage is awesome! Gay cartoon characters are awesome! And if you don't agree with us, we'll punish you by telling everyone that you're gay!"
Last time I checked, talking about something you are proud of and think is "awesome" was not punishment. Please help us out on this one Tico. Give us the "logic" behind it.
0 Replies
 
McGentrix
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 09:04 am
Not to speak for Tico, but she is referring to the continued discussion of Guckert having homosexual websites. The discussion seems to say it's ok to do some fag bashing, as long as the fag is a conservative.
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Steppenwolf
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 09:07 am
0 Replies
 
dyslexia
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 09:17 am
McGentrix wrote:
Not to speak for Tico, but she is referring to the continued discussion of Guckert having homosexual websites. The discussion seems to say it's ok to do some fag bashing, as long as the fag is a conservative.

and the problem is?
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 09:32 am
parados wrote:
....Tico, explain this one to me
Quote:
By contrast, liberals say: "We love gay people! Gay people are awesome! Being gay is awesome! Gay marriage is awesome! Gay cartoon characters are awesome! And if you don't agree with us, we'll punish you by telling everyone that you're gay!"
Last time I checked, talking about something you are proud of and think is "awesome" was not punishment. Please help us out on this one Tico. Give us the "logic" behind it.


I'm not sure exactly what you're having trouble digesting, but if you read it again I think you'll see that Coulter is speaking to what she perceives is the hypocrisy of asserting on the one hand that "We love gay people!" and on the other hand, weilding the "outing" of these gay people as a sword to "punish" people -- specifically Republicans.
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 09:53 am
0 Replies
 
Joe Nation
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 10:21 am
Frank Rich on Gannon, Gonzo and Why it's really hard to know what the hell is going on..

New York Times

If I need to, I will post the text.

Joe(what is the size of your lens?)Nation
0 Replies
 
Ticomaya
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 10:24 am
You'd need to post the text for me to read it. I'm not going to jump through hoops just to read that rag......
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Cycloptichorn
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 10:36 am
Quote:
I'm not sure exactly what you're having trouble digesting, but if you read it again I think you'll see that Coulter is speaking to what she perceives is the hypocrisy of asserting on the one hand that "We love gay people!" and on the other hand, weilding the "outing" of these gay people as a sword to "punish" people -- specifically Republicans.


This doesn't make any sense at all.

The REAL hypocrite in this case is G/G himself; he's the one who wrote virulently anti-gay articles, and then turns out to have some activity in that region himself. That's hypocrisy, baby.

Liberals who have pointed this fact out know that conservatives are going to disown the guy b/c he's gay. And it's true; noone tries to defend any other angle related to this story, other than calling Liberals 'hypocrites,' and that's a f*cking weak argument.

Cheers to all.

Cycloptichorn
0 Replies
 
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 10:50 am
Some activity in the realm? Yes, nearly all gays are prostitutes who post naked pictures on the Internet. That shouldn't be looked down on by Democrats or Republicans. Sure.
0 Replies
 
Lightwizard
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 10:51 am
Isn't there a double standard creeping in? If Gannon had been a female who was a prostitute and on porno sites on the Internet, what would be the reaction?
0 Replies
 
Joe Nation
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 11:02 am
Gonzo Gone, Rather Going, Watergate Still Here
FRANK RICH
Published: March 6, 2005

TWO weeks ago Hunter S. Thompson committed suicide. Next week Dan Rather commits ritual suicide, leaving the anchor chair at CBS prematurely as penance for his toxic National Guard story. The two journalists shared little but an abiding distaste - make that hatred in Thompson's case - for the Great Satan of 20th-century American politics, Richard Nixon. The best work of both was long behind them. Yet memories of that best work - not to mention the coincidental timing of their departures - only accentuate the vacuum in that cultural category we stubbornly insist on calling News.

What's missing from News is the news. On ABC, Peter Jennings devotes two hours of prime time to playing peek-a-boo with U.F.O. fanatics, a whorish stunt crafted to deliver ratings, not information. On NBC, Brian Williams is busy as all get-out, as every promo reminds us, "Reporting America's Story." That story just happens to be the relentless branding of Brian Williams as America's anchorman - a guy just too in love with Folks Like Us to waste his time looking closely at, say, anything happening in Washington. In this environment, it's hard to know whom to root for. After the "60 Minutes" fiasco, Mr. Williams's boss, the NBC president Jeff Zucker, piously derided CBS for its screw-up, bragging of the reforms NBC News instituted after a producer staged a truck explosion for a "Dateline NBC" segment in 1992. "Nothing like that could have gotten through, at any level," Mr. Zucker said of the CBS National Guard story, "because of the safeguards we instituted more than a decade ago." Good for him, but it's not as if a lot else has gotten through either. When was the last time Stone Phillips delivered a scoop, with real or even fake documents, on "Dateline"? Or that NBC News pulled off an investigative coup as stunning as the "60 Minutes II" report on Abu Ghraib? That, poignantly enough, was Mr. Rather's last hurrah before he, too, and through every fault of his own, became a neutered newsman.

Hunter Thompson did not do investigative reporting, but he would have had a savage take on our news-free world - not least because it resembles his own during the Nixon era, before he had calcified into the self-parodistic pop culture cartoon immortalized by Garry Trudeau, Bill Murray, Johnny Depp and most of his eulogists. Read "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" - the chronicle of his Rolling Stone election coverage - and you find that his diagnosis of journalistic dysfunction hasn't aged a day: "The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists." He cites as a classic example the breathless but belated revelations of the mental history of George McGovern's putative running mate, the Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton - a story that had long been known by "half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps." This same clubby pack would be even tardier on Watergate, a distasteful assignment left to a pair of lowly police-beat hacks at The Washington Post.

Thompson was out to break the mainstream media's rules. His unruly mix of fact, opinion and masturbatory self-regard may have made him a blogger before there was an Internet, but he was a blogger who had the zeal to leave home and report firsthand and who could write great sentences that made you want to savor what he found out rather than just scroll quickly through screen after screen of minutiae and rant. When almost all "the Wizards, Gurus and Gentlemen Journalists in Washington" were predicting an unimpeded victory march for Edmund Muskie to the Democratic presidential nomination, it was Thompson who sniffed out the Muskie campaign's "smell of death" and made it stick. The purported front-runner, he wrote, "talked like a farmer with terminal cancer trying to borrow money on next year's crop."

But even Thompson might have been shocked by what's going on now. "The death of Thompson represents the passing from the Age of Gonzo to the Age of Gannon," wrote Russell Cobb in a column in The Daily Texan at the University of Texas. As he argues, today's White House press corps is less likely to be invaded by maverick talents like a drug-addled reporter from a renegade start-up magazine than by a paid propagandist like Jeff Gannon, a fake reporter for a fake news organization (Talon News) run by a bona fide Texas Republican operative who was a delegate to the 2000 Bush convention.

Though a few remain on the case - Eric Boehlert of Salon, mediamatters.org, Joe Strupp of Editor and Publisher - the Gannon story is fast receding. In some major news venues, including ABC and CBS, it never surfaced at all. Yet even as Mr. Gannon has quit his "job" as a reporter and his "news organization" has closed up shop, the plot thickens. His own Web site - which only recently shut down with the self-martyring message "The voice goes silent" - has now restarted as a blog with Gonzo pretensions. The title alone of his first entry, "Fear and Loathing in the Press Room," would send Thompson spinning in his grave had he not asked that his remains be shot out of a cannon.

As a blogger, Mr. Gannon's new tactic is to encourage fellow right-wing bloggers to portray him as the victim of a homophobic left-wing witch hunt that destroyed his privacy. Given that it was Mr. Gannon himself who voluntarily exhibited his own private life by appearing on Web sites advertising his services as a $200-per-hour escort, that's a hard case to make. But it is a clever way to deflect attention from an actual sexual witch hunt conducted by his own fake news organization in early 2004. It was none other than Talon News that advanced the fictional story that a young woman "taped an interview with one of the major television networks" substantiating a rumor on the Drudge Report that John F. Kerry had had an extramarital affair with an intern. (Mr. Kerry had to publicly deny the story just as his campaign came out of the gate.) This is the kind of dirty trick only G. Gordon Liddy could dream up. Or maybe did. Mr. Gannon's Texan boss, Bobby Eberle, posted effusive thanks (for "their assistance, guidance and friendship") to both Mr. Liddy and Karl Rove on Talon News's sister site, GOPUSA, last Christmas.

Mr. Gannon, a self-promoting airhead, may well be a pawn of larger forces as the vainglorious Mr. Liddy once was. But to what end? That Kerry "intern" wasn't the only "news" Mr. Gannon helped stuff in the pipeline during an election year. A close reading of the transcripts of televised White House press conferences reveals that at uncannily crucial moments he was called on by the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, to stanch tough questioning on such topics as Abu Ghraib and Mr. Rove's possible involvement in the outing of the C.I.A. spy Valerie Plame. We still don't know how this Zelig, using a false name, was given a daily White House pass every day for two years. Last weekend, Jim Pinkerton, a former official in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, said on "Fox News Watch," no less, that such a feat "takes an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House," that it had to be "conscious" and that "some investigation should proceed and they should find that out."

Given an all-Republican government, the only investigation possible will have to come from the press. Which takes us back to 1972, the year of Thompson's fear and loathing on the campaign trail. That was no golden age for news either. As Thompson's Rolling Stone colleague, Timothy Crouse, wrote in his own chronicle of that year, "The Boys on the Bus," months of stories by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein failed to "sink in" and only 48 percent of those polled by Gallup had heard of Watergate by Election Day.

Some news organizations had simply ignored The Post's scoops "out of petty rivalry," wrote Mr. Crouse. Others did so because they "feared the administration or favored Nixon in the presidential race." Others didn't initially recognize the story's importance. (The New York Times played the Watergate break-in on page 30.) The White House's pathological secrecy and penchant for threatening to use the Federal Communications Commission as a battering ram on its broadcast critics took care of the rest. According to a superb new history of the Washington press corps, "Reporting from Washington," by Donald A. Ritchie, even Mr. Rather, then CBS's combative man in the Nixon White House, "left the Watergate story alone at first, sure that it would fade like 'a puff of talcum powder.' "

For similar if not identical reasons, journalistic investigations into the current administration rarely "sink in" either. Early stories in The Boston Globe and Washington Post on what Jeff Gannon himself (on his blog) now calls "Gannongate" faded like that puff of powder. So did Eric Lichtblau's recent Times report on the White House's suppression of the 9/11 commission finding that federal aviation officials ignored dozens of advance warnings of Al Qaeda airline hijackings and suicide missions. But we've now entered a new twilight zone: in 1972, at least, the press may have been stacked with jokers but not with counterfeit newsmen.

Today you can't tell the phonies without a scorecard. Besides the six "journalists" we know to have been paid by the administration or its backers, bloggers were on the campaign payrolls of both a Republican office-seeker (South Dakota's Senator John Thune) and a Democrat (Howard Dean) during last year's campaign. This week The Los Angeles Times reported that Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration, "taking a cue from President Bush's administration," had distributed fake news videos starring a former TV reporter to extol the governor's slant on a legislative proposal. Back in Washington, the Social Security Administration is refusing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests for information about its use of public relations firms - such as those that funneled taxpayers' money to the likes of Armstrong Williams.

Don't expect news organizations dedicated to easy-listening news to get to the bottom of it."Reporting America's Story," NBC's slogan, is what Hunter Thompson actually did before the phrase was downsized into a vacuous marketing strategy. As for Mr. Rather, he gave a valedictory interview to Ken Auletta of The New Yorker in which he said, "The one thing I hope, and I believe, is that even my enemies think that I am authentic."

The bar is so low these days that authenticity may well constitute a major journalistic accomplishment in itself.

====
Emphasis mine. I hope it doesn't distract from Mr. Rich's words. They don't reassure me.

Joe(All I know is what I read in the papers. WRogers)Nation
0 Replies
 
FreeDuck
 
  1  
Reply Fri 4 Mar, 2005 12:02 pm
Lightwizard wrote:
Isn't there a double standard creeping in? If Gannon had been a female who was a prostitute and on porno sites on the Internet, what would be the reaction?


Oh, I was so going to post the exact same question!
0 Replies
 
 

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