Gannongate: the weird story of a non-scandal

National Review, March 14, 2005 by Byron York

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?"