Bush's invisible scandal.

Imagine it's 1998 and Bill Clinton is still our president. A White House "reporter" is revealed to be a gay prostitute working for a Web site owned by a Democratic activist. Not only that, but the reporter turns out to be a special favorite of the Clinton administration: He's called on regularly by White House press secretary Mike McCurry because he knows he can count on him for a softball question, and even the president singles him out for a question whenever he needs relief from tough interrogators at televised press conferences.

What happens? Five thousand right-wing radio talk-show hosts go wild. Another sex scandal in the White House! Fox News alleges a "homosexual cabal" in the administration. Congressional Republicans call for hearings and subpoena the White House press secretary. "Liberal" White House reporters--eager to prove they would never give a "liberal" administration a break--all start writing front-page stories about Clinton's latest moral breakdown.

All that, of course, is a fantasy, but what follows is not: In late January, White House "reporter" Jeff Gannon was revealed to be James Dale Guckert, a male escort who displayed his wares at HotMilitaryStud.com. Why did the White House give him a daily pass every day for two years when it knew he'd been denied Capitol Hill press credentials because he couldn't prove that he worked for an independent news organization? Did he have a special relationship with White House press secretary Scott McClellan (who said at a White House briefing that he was aware Gannon wasn't his real name)? Or was he a friend of the Republican National Committee's new chairman, Ken Mehlman? Mehlman refuses to be interviewed by The Advocate, and his spokesmen will confirm his heterosexuality only off the record.

If this prostitute had been a woman, "Who was she sleeping with?" would have been everyone's first question. But because he is a man, mainstream reporters and Bush Republicans have all adopted a "don't ask, don't tell" approach. No one even wants to make the connection between this fake reporter and the Administration's other attempts to distort the news through video press releases disguised as news stories and payoffs to Bush-friendly columnists.

So instead of being a new 24/7 scandal for the cable news networks, the Gannon story has been denigrated as an obsession of Internet conspiracy nuts. For the scandal's first month, neither CBS nor ABC ever mentioned Gannon/Guckert's name on any of its news programs. Much of the story's coverage in The New York Times came from columnists Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich; and when the Los Angeles Times finally caught up, reporter Johanna Neuman pooh-poohed the whole thing as a nonstory--attributing the flap to "gay activists" indulging in "bloglust"--for revealing that the so-called reporter was really just an ordinary whore.

The Los Angeles Times did follow Neuman's pathetic piece with an op-ed by John Aravosis, editor of AmericaBlog.com. Aravosis, who helped to break the Gannon story in the first place, cited the three top reasons for the failures of the mainstream press: "trepidation about gays, sex, and power"; "blogophobia"; and, most important, "reverse liberal guilt. Too sensitive to right-wing accusations of being liberal, traditional media have overcompensated by becoming too timid in covering certain stories."

All of which may explain the reaction of my old friend Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, when I asked about his network's abject failure to cover this story: "I don't have time today to get into this with you. The executive producers make these editorial decisions on their own, based on their judgment and the other news of the day--and, frankly, I don't know whether individual broadcasts have mentioned it or not, so I can't comment on the Salon story [which said CBS had blown the Jeff Gannon story] or your characterization of it."

So much for the responsibility of the media to cover a big story--or the duty of a network news president to guide the people who work for him.