Gannongate: the weird story of a non-scandal.

IF you've been spending your time following developments in the fight over Social Security, or the nuclear showdown with North Korea, or the formation of a government in Iraq, you might have missed what has become, to some on the left, the biggest scandal of the Bush administration: Gannongate.

The name refers to Jeff Gannon, a previously little-known correspondent for a previously little-known conservative website called Talon News. For the last couple of years, Gannon was a fixture at White House briefings, where he often asked questions with a clear conservative slant (as opposed to questions from others with a clear liberal slant). Although the softballs Gannon lobbed to press secretary Scott McClellan irritated some members of the press corps, Gannon did not attract much attention until January 26, when President Bush surprised reporters by giving a news conference.

Toward the end of the session, after making the obligatory calls on television, newspaper, and wire reporters, Bush--for the first time ever in his presidency--pointed to Gannon.

"Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy," Gannon began. "Harry Reid was talking about soup lines and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there's no crisis there. You've said you're going to reach out to these people. How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"

The question was undeniably loaded, and media watchdogs on the left were outraged. By the afternoon of January 26, Media Matters for America, a website run by David Brock--the self-described former "right-wing hit man"--posted an article asking, "Is Talon a news organization or an arm of the Republican Party?" In coming days, Brock's site--which is funded by donors to Democratic 527 organizations (see "David Brock Is Buzzing Again," NR, May 24, 2004)--questioned the legitimacy of Talon News (it is an offshoot of an organization known as GOPUSA, although it has no connection to the Republican party) and the White House's judgment in allowing Gannon into briefings. Media Matters also revealed that Gannon sometimes lifted long passages from White House or GOP press releases and included them verbatim in his stories.

That was just the beginning. On January 28, a popular blogger named Atrios, whose actual name is Duncan Black and who is a senior fellow at Media Matters, published a brief note saying, "According to sources, Jeff Gannon's real name is not, in fact, Jeff Gannon. According to the same sources, his White House press credentials list him as 'Jeff Gannon'--they let him use his pseudonym." At the same time, several posters at DailyKos.com, one of the most heavily visited of the leftist websites, were doing their own research on Gannon. On January 31, a poster with the web name, "Radically Bitter," reported that Gannon's website, JeffGannon.com, was registered by the same entity that had also registered dozens of other websites, among them "hotmilitarystud.com" and "militaryescorts.com," which were both apparently offering gay-escort services.

That information, along with word that Gannon owed some back income taxes, bounced around the blogosphere for several days as Gannon denied that he had anything to do with the gay-prostitute websites. And then came more. On February 7, Atrios wrote that "sources allege that Jeff Gannon's real name is James D. 'JD' Guckert, though I have not been able to confirm this." Almost immediately, a number of left-wing bloggers found pictures of Gannon/Guckert posing nude for gay sites. His story that he had nothing to do with the sites collapsed. On February 8, Gannon resigned.

It might seem odd to some that what began as a story about one reporter's soft question turned into a hostile outing. The liberal bloggers claimed they were justified in their actions because Gannon was a "hypocrite" who, they charged, wrote anti-gay stories for Talon. But the best they could come up with was a 2004 story in which Gannon, playing off the oft-quoted saying that Bill Clinton was America's first black president, wrote that John Kerry "might someday be known as 'the first gay president.'" Kerry, Gannon continued, "has enjoyed a 100 percent rating from the homosexual advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), since 1995 in recognition of his support for the pro-gay agenda."

It was not what one might call blazing hate speech, but it was enough for DailyKos, Atrios, and a gay activist named John Aravosis, who runs a site called AmericaBlog, to press the hypocrisy argument hard. But their anger seemed to go deeper than a resentment of anything Gannon had said or written. The real problem, they appeared to believe, was that Gannon was gay and a conservative Republican supporter of George W. Bush. That they would not accept.

When Gannon defended himself in an interview with the Washington Post, saying his critics were "willing to abandon their principles on the basis of trying to make me out to be a hypocrite," his prosecutors exploded in rage. "We're 'abandoning our principles' by going after you?" wrote Aravosis, addressing Gannon. "Don't lecture me about principles, Mr. Anti-gay by day, and gay-for-pay at night. You worked for anti-gay bigots, sucked up to an anti-gay president, helped him get re-elected, and expect us to, what, thank you for it?"

In today's media world, it was inevitable that the issue would find its way into the mainstream press. As the bloggers combed Gannon's background, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and cable-news channels picked up on the story. Not wanting to dig too deeply into the gay-sex angle, the mainstream reports focused on the question of Gannon's access to the White House.

Specifically, did Gannon have a "hard pass" allowing him permanent entry into the building? Was he allowed into the White House under an assumed name? And in any event, did he deserve to be part of the White House press corps?

Some of the answers weren't too complicated. For example, the White House said unequivocally that Gannon did not have a hard pass. Instead, he was allowed in on what are known as daily passes, in which the journalist calls the White House ahead of time and gives his name, date of birth, and Social Security number. Gannon, the White House said, entered under his real name, Guckert.

Nevertheless, critics still suggested that Gannon had special access. One of the most prominent was Keith Olbermann, host of the MSNBC program Countdown, who has made a virtual running feature of Gannongate. "How did James Guckert/Jeff Gannon get White House press credentials?" Olbermann asked on February 17, well after the White House had made clear that Gannon did not have press credentials. In the Times, Maureen Dowd wrote, "I was rejected for a White House press pass at the start of the Bush administration, but someone with an alias, a tax evasion problem and Internet pictures where he posed like the 'Barberini Faun' is credentialed to cover a White House that won a second term by mining homophobia and preaching family values?"

Seemingly nothing the White House said would convince the Olbermanns and Dowds of the world that Gannon did not receive special access. But the administration kept on trying.

"He did not have a hard pass," McClellan said in an interview with NATIONAL REVIEW. "He did not apply for a hard pass." McClellan said Gannon got into the White House the way other visitors do, using his real name. As for whether a representative of Talon News should have been considered for entry into the White House, McClellan said he does not want to pass judgment on who gets in and who doesn't. "I've never inserted myself into the credentialing process here. I don't think it is the place of the White House press secretary to start picking and choosing who covers the White House. I don't think the press secretary should be drawing the lines, because then the question is, Where do you draw the line? Do you draw the line at advocacy journalism? There are people there who cross that line every day."

The reality of the White House briefing room bears McClellan out. The fact is, it's simply not too hard to get inside for a briefing, and people of all professional and ideological stripes are there. There is, for example, Russell Mokhiber, who runs a far-left newsletter and sometimes asks McClellan off-the-wall questions: Recently, he wanted to know whether President Bush believes the Sixth Commandment applies to the war in Iraq. Last year, Mokhiber took time off to volunteer for the Ralph Nader campaign. When he returned, McClellan said, at the briefing, "Russ, welcome back. It's been a while. How was the Nader campaign?"

That's not exactly an atmosphere of enforced ideological rigidity. And White House correspondents, by and large, want to keep the door as open as possible. "The whole story here is that there's a low bar to get into the White House, which I'm perfectly fine with as a journalist and as a member of the White House Correspondents' Association," says Ron Hutcheson, who covers the White House for Knight-Ridder newspapers and is president of the correspondents' group. "My outrage factor on this is pretty low."

But on the left, the outrage factor is very, very high. In recent days, DailyKos and other sites have featured elaborate conspiracy theories linking Gannon to all sorts of things, including the 2000 Florida recount and the CBS story on the president's National Guard records. Just for the record, there is no evidence that Gannon had anything to do with any of that.

But don't tell the far Left. "This is huge," wrote one poster, echoing the sentiments of many others. No doubt he really believes it, and no evidence--or lack of it--will convince him otherwise.