Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Chicago Tribune | A White House plant?

By Charlie Madigan
“What did the White House know and when did it know it on the question of the kinky bald guy with the stinky Web sites who got to pose as a 'daily pass' reporter in the White House press corps?

He got to help the White House wiggle out of unpleasant moments by asking questions worthy of a doofus, which drew the attention of the blogosphere, which shifted into 'high proctology' mode in a recent hot pursuit of the caper.

Bingo, another media incident explodes.

Well, good for the bloggers.

But there's one problem left, and that is the big question: Did the White House knowingly plant this lap doof in the press corps or, as indicated in many White House comments, was it just something that happened over time despite lots of scrutiny that led them to conclude he was legit, sort of?”

First, some history.

James Guckert was his name and Talon News was the game.

If this were the old TV Untouchables, Walter Winchell would be shouting, "Talon....a conservative front organization masquerading as an innocent news website...was water boy for the right people...if you get my drift...it was a plane with one wing...and it always turned to the right...."

And so on.

Talon was connected to a decidedly partisan something called GOPUSA. Letterheads went to the White House, the minions in the press office "checked it out" and concluded Talon was actually a news organization and it was legit, we have been told.

Anyhow, for a couple of years, this Guckert guy, masquerading as reporter Jeff Gannon, got to be in the White House press corps because the White House decided to let him in. Lots of Talon stories, we are told, looked a lot like White House and Republican Party handouts.

During the campaign last year, I made an attempt to get a ticket as a normal person, not as a reporter writing the Gleaner, to a Bush rally in Holland, Mich. I made exactly one call to an old guy at the local Republican committee to cop a ticket.

Before you knew it, local Republicans, regional Republicans and National Republicans were all over me. No! You can't go as a normal person. You must go as a reporter and sit where the reporters sit.

You may not ramble around.

Well, what fun is that?

I made a half-hearted attempt to follow the rules, got my credentials and went to the event outside of Holland. Once I cleared security, I dashed off to freedom to ask a guy in a funny hat what he was up to.

It took less than two minutes for a woman in a nice blue suit to rush up to me with some "security" in tow and announce I couldn't do that, that I had to sit in the press section and stay there.

Since the "press" wasn't even going to arrive for another two hours, I thought that would be kind of limiting, so I respectfully said, "No @#$%#$ way in hell."

They held a meeting and affixed a tour guide to my side, a nice young woman who turned out to be a good interview because of the details of her life and why they made her think like a Republican.

Soon, she was withdrawn, probably for being too communicative, and was replaced by a fat guy who spent the entire event following me around and asking me if I was "getting what I needed."

That, I thought, was a very personal question.

Think about it this way. The Bush people were so efficient and focused they could reach all the way out to Holland, Mich. and try to put a choke collar on an innocent Rambling Gleaner.

Given that, can there be any doubt about what they knew about the ringer sitting in the middle of the press room for the briefings just about every day?

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-gleaner,1,1375290.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

1 comment:

  1. White House liberally plays with truth by Clarence Page
    http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/ny-vppag234154367feb23.story

    “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 of a land deal and 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 pressroom access lists so that it could give access to a fellow like Guckert, who dependably asks softball questions because he reports for a partisan Web site that supports the administration.

    Imagine how they would question the access given by 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 and then switched to his alter ego of Jeff Gannon. The best explanation for this that Bush 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 another Web site, GOPUSA, a conservative Web site based in Houston and dedicated to "spreading the conservative message throughout America."

    He attracted the attention of liberal bloggers when he asked President George W. Bush a squeezably soft question at a news conference in January: How, he asked the president, could he work "with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?" Liberal bloggers also uncovered links between Guckert and gay-oriented Web sites.

    But all that's a titillating sideshow compared to the charges that House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) has called to the attention of the special prosecutor investigating the leak of Valerie Plame's identity as a CIA operative to columnist Robert Novak. In 2003 Guckert wrote in Talon News that he had asked Plame's husband, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, about "an internal government memo prepared by U.S. intelligence personnel" that revealed his wife's CIA role.

    Revealing a CIA agent's identity is a federal crime.…

    Of course, every administration tries to manipulate the media. Team Bush has elevated it to a high art. Before Guckert, there was the disclosure that three conservative syndicated columnists had been paid handsomely to promote administration programs - payment they failed to disclose to readers.

    And remember those pre- packaged video news releases featuring fake reporters so local news outlets would be tempted to run them as legitimate news stories, as some did? But I thought the last straw was the unprecedented herding of reporters covering this year's inaugural balls into pens from which they could only venture to interview ball guests if they were escorted by "minders" in the fashion of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Tell me again: What was that war about? Oh, yeah: freedom and democracy. Great. We could use a little more back here at home.

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