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

Quote:

And then there are the prominent bloggers whose effusive praise for Howard Dean and other Democrats appears to have been fueled by cash from interested paries.

There's a statement just begging to be asked, "What information do you have to support this allegation?"

If you want to accuse the other side of not accepting facts then could you at least PRESENT SOME? Things like this always make my blood boil. I don't care which side does it. Create a standard and apply it equally. #$**%& $$**@@ (all the swear words muttered under my breath)

Would you care to refute the statement by CLinton? Did Iran NOT have elections like he claimed? Or perhaps the progressives and liberals didn't win like he claimed? What precisely is incorrect about that statement?

Reality is based on FACTS, not opinions. Dispute the facts or accept the reality.

Jerome asked me to note, correctly, that he took a hiatus from blogging from June until December. Furthermore, he asked me to clarify that I didn't mean to imply that there was an understanding that he was being paid to blog positive things about Dean. If you read my post carefully, you would have seen that was clear.

UPDATE: For the record, I'm just guessing that it's possible that one of the reasons Matt was hired is because of his extant role among bloggers. I know Matt and he's a supersmart guy with a great deal of expertise in using the internet to disseminate ideas

Transcript of Dan Rather's apology. Feel free to compare it to Timber's claim from earlier.

Quote:

Last week, amid increasing questions about the authenticity of documents used in support of a "60 Minutes Wednesday" story <snip of already quoted ratherblather>

Report OF THE INDEPENDENT REVIEW PANEL (Download note: 234 page pdf file)

DiICK THORNBURGH AND LOIS D. BOCCARDI



On the September 8, 2004 60 Minutes Wednesday Segment "For the Record"

Concerning President Bush's Texas Air National Guard Service

January 5, 2005

<excerpt from page 26 of 234>

" ... Rather told the Panel that he delivered the apology and gave the WCBS interview in support of CBS News' decision that the time had come to stop defending the Segment and, indeed, to disown it. He told the Panel, however, that he did not fully agree with this decision and still believes that the content of the documents is accurate. The Panel is troubled by these conflicting statements ... "



<excerpt from page 208 of 234>

" ... The Panel asked Rather about his interview with Marcia Kramer. Rather said that he did not want to do the interview or the apology on September 20, but Heyward and Schwartz asked him to do so. Rather said that he made his case as to why an apology was not appropriate and that management did not agree with him. Rather agreed to do the apology on September 20 and the Marcia Kramer interview because he is a "team player." Rather informed the Panel that he still believes the content of the documents is true because "the facts are right on the money," and that no one had provided persuasive evidence that the documents were not authentic.

It is clear that Rather's joining in the apology given his role as the correspondent on the Segment and his status as CBS News' most visible presence was critical to its acceptance. The Panel finds his comments disavowing the apology to be troubling ... "

Do you have an article title for the WSJ piece? It doesn't take a lot to get to their site. A library card does the trick.

BTW - Rather said he felt, given enough time, the documents would have been validated - hardly an apology of substance. He mostly apologized for gettin' busted

Rather informed the Panel that he still believes the content of the documents is true

... by far, by far one of the most informative I've read on this subject.

They've done an excellent job of documenting and proving the pattern of media exclusion and manipulation the Bush admin. is guilty of.

I implore you, folks, READ THIS PAGE!!!!!!!

... Surely you don't think paying a blogger is the same as paying a journalist!

Informative - or agreeable to a set of prejuduces and preconceptions you find comfortin'? Jay Rosen is a partisan hack who's own sacred cow has been gored, IMO. The very concept that print journalism holds some revered and privileged stature above and beyond any other form of journalism is ridiculous on its face.

What is goin' on is not an "eshewing of the media" by any means. Still, to those used to and fond of the free reign accorded to the left/liberal media types since the ''60s, I can understand how it might seem so. I'm sure its painful.

Having fallen from the position of popular White House correspondent (popular with Scott McClellan that is) to lowly right-wing lunatic fringe blogger, our Jeff appears to be losint it. First of all he's started asking imaginary "briefing questions" on his blog as if he were still a member of the White House press corps. "While I am on hiatus from the White House briefing room, I'm going to post the question I would have asked had I been there," writes Jeff. "It will be interesting to see if anyone else asks it."

Just a few comments: 1) I think Jeff needs to find out what the word "hiatus" means and realize that he's not on one. 2) Watch closely over the coming weeks as Jeff starts asking questions like "Why won't anyone talk to me?" and "Scott, why don't you call me any more?" 3) It's just a bit creepy.

Second, Gannon appears to be attempting to transform himself from "Bulldog," the 8" cut hot military m4m stud, into a red-blooded womanizing good-ol'-boy. On his blog, Jeff says "My faith and my ideology are rock solid" (interesting choice of words). And picking a bone - if you'll pardon the pun - with Maureen Dowd, Gannon refers to her as "this gal who probably needs a bit of the old Jeff Gannon to relieve some of that pent up whatever." Uh, sure thing, Jeff (wink). Quick question though: what page of the Conservative Morals And Values™ handbook is that on?

While we're on the subject of Jeff Gannon, Ann Coulter posed some curious questionsons in a recent article. "Are we supposed to like gay people now, or hate them? Is there a Web site where I can go to and find out how the Democrats want me to feel about gay people on a moment-to-moment basis?" This was, of course, in response to revelations that Jeff Gannon is a gay prostitute.

So I have a couple questions of my own: Are we supposed to like gay people now, or hate them? Is there a Web site where I can go to and find out how the Republicans want me to feel about gay people on a moment-to-moment basis?

It's just that I'm perfectly consistent in my support for gay rights. What I'm not comfortable with is the White House giving a real live prostitute with a fake name who works for a fake news organization that is actually a front for a Republican activist group free and easy access to press briefings so that the aforementioned prostitute can toss softball questions at the president to get him out of sticky situations.

But now we're in a bizarre situation where Republicans like Coulter are one day screaming about amending the Constitution in order to discriminate against gays, or telling me that gays are sinners who are going to hell, or that cartoon characters are secretly working on an evil gay agenda to corrupt our children, or that "tolerance" and "love" are secret gay code words, and then the next day they're telling me that I'm the homophobe and poor gay people like Jeff Gannon need to be defended from the likes of me and my awful liberal friends.

I mean, if gay prostitution is okay - which, according to all these Republicans who are now accusing the left of homophobia, it is - then gay marriage must be double-plus-good, right? Otherwise I just don't get the argument. How come, according to Republicans, it's fine for a gay man to sell himself for no-strings-attached sex with other men online, but it's not fine for two gay men to enter into a lifelong, loving marriage partnership?

Still, at least there's no ambiguity about the fact that Republicans think all Arabs are terrorists. In the same column, Coulter says, "Press passes can't be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president." So while Ann may have suddenly had a dramatic transformation on gay rights, at least that ol' racism is alive and well.

White House Approves Pass for Blogger
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE

Published: March 7, 2005

Another signal moment for bloggers is to occur this morning, when Garrett M. Graff, who writes a blog about the news media in Washington, is to be ushered into the White House briefing room to attend the daily press "gaggle."

Mr. Graff, 23, may be the first blogger in the short history of the medium to be granted a daily White House pass for the specific purpose of writing a blog, or Web log. A White House spokesman said yesterday that he believed Mr. Graff was the first blogger to be given credentials.

He is being given a press pass as the editor of FishbowlDC (www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc), a blog that is published by Mediabistro.com, which offers networking and services for journalists.

Increasingly, bloggers are penetrating the preserves of the mainstream news media. They have secured seats on campaign planes, at political conventions and in presidential debates, and have become a driving force in news events themselves.

Mr. Graff said he was inspired to try to seek access to the White House by the controversy over James D. Guckert, who used the alias Jeff Gannon. Mr. Guckert was granted daily passes to White House briefings while writing for a Web site run by a Republican operative in Texas. The episode raised questions about who was a legitimate journalist and how access to the White House was granted.

White House press officials and others said it was relatively easy to get a day pass, prompting Mr. Graff to test that premise. He set about trying to get one and chronicled his attempt on his blog.

He made 20 phone calls and got nowhere. Bigger blogs picked up on his saga, and traffic on FishbowlDC increased tenfold, he said. But it was not until the traditional media joined in, Mr. Graff said, that the White House relented.

"USA Today started making calls on Thursday. CNN mentioned it on 'Inside Politics,' and Ron Hutcheson, president of the White House Correspondents Association, raised the issue with the White House Press Office," he said. "I think a combination of all of that made the White House pay attention and decide to let me in."

Scott McClellan, the White House press secretary, said he had met with the White House Correspondents Association and they had decided to let Mr. Graff in. "It is the press corps' briefing room and if there are any new lines to be drawn, it should be done by their association," he said.

Mr. Graff said he was surprised at the help he received from "real" reporters covering the White House, given what he described as the animosity between some bloggers and the mainstream news media.

Mr. Graff is something of a bridge between those two worlds. Although he is a blogger, he has old-media genes: his father, Christopher Graff, is the chief correspondent in Vermont for The Associated Press; and his grandfather, Bert McCord, was the drama critic for The New York Herald Tribune.

Mr. Graff himself was executive editor of The Harvard Crimson. He said he became a blogger because "it's the newest trend in journalism."

In any case, Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University and specialist in blogging, said Mr. Graff's odyssey was significant for two reasons. First, he showed that it was harder to get a pass than the White House said it was after the Guckert case.

Secondly, he said, Mr. Graff was expanding the definition of what constitutes the press, just as radio and television once pushed those boundaries.

Um, if you were to actually GO to Democraticundground.com and read for yourself, ....

Read This

Garance Franke-Ruta has a wonderful, must read piece up about the ways in which the left and right blogosphere work. When it comes to scalp hunting, the right is (as always) professional and funded. And once again the usual suspects are present:


Scratch the surface and the same names turn up in each scandal, revealing the events of mid-February to have been part of an ongoing and coordinated proxy war by Republican political operatives on the so-called liberal media, conducted through the vast, unmonitored loophole of the Internet.

[...]

But success bred change. Along has come a new group of bloggers who aren't mere "citizens" at all. On the left side, some of these became deeply enmeshed with political parties, "527s," and campaign advocacy groups -- and are now a new generation of no-holds-barred partisans and major party fund-raisers, the liberal equivalent of George W. Bush's "Rangers" and "Pioneers."

On the right, a number of these bloggers were already political operatives or worked at long-standing movement institutions before taking up residence online. They are, at best, the intellectual heirs of L. Brent Bozell of the Media Research Center and Reed Irvine, who founded the ultraconservative, media-hounding nonprofit organization Accuracy In Media (AIM) in 1969 as part of the first generation of post-Barry Goldwater right-wing institutions. At worst, they're the protégés of conservative fund-raiser Richard Viguerie and dirty-tricks master Morton Blackwell, who has tutored conservative activists since 1965, most recently mocking John Kerry at the Republican national convention by distributing Band-Aids with purple hearts on them.

Which brings us back to Jordan. He was brought down not by outraged citizen-bloggers but by a mix of GOP operatives and military conservatives. Easongate.com, the blog that served as the clearinghouse for the attack on CNN, was helped along by Virginia-based Republican operative Mike Krempasky. From May 1999 through August 2003, Krempasky worked for Blackwell as the graduate development director of the Leadership Institute, an Arlington, Virginia-based school for conservative leaders founded by Blackwell in 1979. The institute is the organization that had provided "Gannon" with his sole media credential before he became a White House correspondent. It also now operates "Internet Activist Schools" designed to teach conservatives how to engage in "guerilla Internet activism."

Indeed, Krempasky could be found teaching this Internet activism course one recent February weekend to about 30 young conservatives at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington. "He advocated that people write from their experience -- and not necessarily as conservatives," a Democratic consultant who attended the seminar incognito told me. For example, Krempasky told "a conservative firefighter" that he should write about firefighting because that would be of interest to readers. Using that angle, he could build an audience. And if push ever came to shove, he could respond to an online dogfight from the unassailable position of being a firefighter -- and not as just another conservative ideologue. Krempasky then offered to help all the attendees set up their own blogs. "We're definitely in serious trouble," said the Democratic attendee.

The tactics Krempasky promotes are directly descended from those advocated by the late Reed Irvine of AIM, whose major funder was, for the past two decades, Richard Mellon Scaife. "Many bloggers and blog readers might not even know who Reed Irvine was, nor understand the debt we owe him as conservatives," Krempasky wrote upon Irvine's passing last year. "But that debt is tremendous." In the late '80s, Irvine had started the campaign to "Can Dan" Rather, coining the phrase "Rather Biased." Last fall, Krempasky was operating the main anti-Rather site, Rathergate.com, and using Irvine's slogan as a rallying cry to organize a vast letter-writing and e-mailing campaign "to contact CBS and express themselves," as he put it in an interview with Bobby Eberle of GOPUSA, an activist Web site founded by Texas Republicans and now owned by Bruce Eberle (no relation), the proprietor of a conservative direct-mail firm. "Conservatives have operated through alternative media for 40 years, direct mail being the first one," Krempasky told me, sitting in the food court of the Ronald Reagan International Building as the CPAC wound down. "As far as the Internet goes, conservatives have largely been ahead of the left."

Also part of the Easongate.com team was La Shawn Barber, who writes a biweekly column for -- again, the name pops up -- GOPUSA and has written for AIM about "the Bush-bashing media." Working alongside Krempasky and Barber was another site, RedState.org, "a Republican community weblog" registered with the Federal Election Commission as a 527. Krempasky helped found that site along with Senate staffer Ben Domenech, the chief speechwriter for Bush ally and Texas Senator John Cornyn; and former U.S. Army officer Josh Trevino, a conservative blogger who used to write under the name "Tacitus." The goal of RedState.org? "[T]o unite … voices from government, politics, activism, civil society, and journalism" in service of the "construction of a Republican majority."


Just read the whole thing. And then come back and we'll get Zephyr Teachout on the horn and get on that blogging ethics thing right away. I feel very confident that the right is going to be very happy to sign on. And then we can all sing Kumbaya and play Yahtzee.

Clearly the right blogosphere is more professional and more sophisticated than the left. They have fully incorporated it into their noise machine and added it to their bag of dirty tricks. We, on the other hand, are becoming adept internet detectives and clearing houses for citizen action. They are top down, we are grassroots. They are party apparatchiks, we are a vibrant political constituency in our own right. I'll put my money on us for the long term. Like their Leninist mentors, their edifice will fall of its own weight.

But in the meantime, I wonder how much more of these phony blogs are out there? Maybe this is a job for DKOS-CSI.