NBC Gives Air Time to Left-Wing Cause-Celeb:
Gannon/Guckert
Jeff Gannon/James Guckert NBC on Thursday gave broadcast network air time the cause-celeb of left-wing bloggers, the case of Jeff Gannon/James Guckert, a writer for a GOP-oriented Web site who posed softball questions during White House press briefings and who quit his job in the wake of bloggers' revelations about his background and changed name. The subject has animated MSNBC and CNN for a couple of weeks. On Thursday night, CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 devoted a segment to it with Howard Kurtz and MSNBC's Countdown led with how the "Gannon controversy widens." Today and Nightly News ran pieces Thursday as Brian Williams claimed Gannon/Guckert "is the talk of Washington these days." NBC's Tom Costello cited Gannon's "softball" questions during the Bush years, but as the MRC's Tim Graham argued on National Review Online, "if anyone who asked softball questions at the White House 'had to go,' the White House briefing room would have almost emptied out in the Clinton years."
Brian Williams set up the February 17 NBC Nightly News story, as checked against the closed-captioning by the MRC's Brad Wilmouth, a shorter version of which ran earlier in the day on Today: "There is another controversy brewing tonight. This one involves the Bush administration and the news media. It is the talk of Washington these days. It involves a man who was a regular in the White House press briefing room. He was free to ask President Bush and his press secretary questions on a regular basis, but it turns out he wasn't really a journalist and wasn't using his real name. And there is more to his past that is making a lot of people wonder what he was doing in the White House in the first place. Here is NBC's Tom Costello."
Costello began: "It was at this presidential press conference where one question about Democrats-"
Jeff Gannon at briefing: "How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"
Costello: "-ultimately led to questions about the questioner. Within days, Internet bloggers had learned Jeff Gannon was really James Guckert, a reporter for Talon News, the editorial news arm of gop-usa.com. Both Web sites run out of the Houston home of Bobby Eberle, a Republican activist with a mission."
Bobby Eberle: "Bringing the conservative message to America. We're trying to put a message out there that we hope people will agree with and respond to."
Costello: "Despite having no White House press credentials and being denied Capitol Hill credentials, the White House knew Guckert's real name and gave him passes to the daily press briefings, where he was called on regularly."
Scott McClellan clip #1: "Go ahead, Jeff."
McClellan clip #2: "Jeff, go ahead."
McClellan clip #3: "Go ahead, Jeff."
Costello: "For nearly two years, asking questions other reporters considered softballs. This one, comparing the President's military service to John Kerry's."
Gannon, at a White House press briefing: "Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam?"
Costello: "In a radio interview last week, Guckert took issue with the softball accusation."
Gannon, on WNYC in New York City: "Why does every question to the President of the United States have to be hostile? He took my question and he spoke to it."
Costello: "But with the administration having just admitted to paying commentators like Armstrong Williams to promote administration policies, Guckert's questions took on greater significance. Journalism ethics lecturer Kelly McBride says Guckert was no journalist."
Kelly McBride: "Was he a plant? Was he a ringer? It's a great question, and that has yet to be answered."
Costello: "White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan says simply, 'In this day and age, when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide or try to pick and choose who is a journalist.' But there's a bizarre turn, with liberal bloggers discovering that Guckert was affiliated with several gay Web sites, and even appearing to pose for a male escort service. All this raising questions: With Guckert's background, why did the White House grant him a daily pass? And how could he have been allowed to get so close to the President? Guckert has now left TalonNews.com, and the Web site promises to replace him at the White House, reporting its version of the news. Only this time, his replacement will not use an alias. Tom Costello, NBC News, Washington."
A reprint of "Gannons to the Left of Me: Softball reporter questions were routine in the Clinton White House," a February 16 National Review Online posting by Tim Graham, Director of Media Analysis at the MRC:
Stunned by the liberal mini-tempest over Talon News reporter "Jeff Gannon" (real name: James Guckert) asking a softball question to President Bush on January 26, leaders of the White House Correspondents Association met with Bush press spokesman Scott McClellan Tuesday to discuss tightening up the press-credentialing process.
Liberal media elitists say they want only "real" journalists, not "partisan operatives," to be allowed in the White House briefing room. But what they really might wind up accomplishing with their "Gannongate" pounding was the silencing of rare right-leaning voice in the White House press corps. To them, you can only be "authentic" by pounding the president from the left.
At the Columbia Journalism Review blog, Brian Montopoli claims "this isn't a media bias issue, no matter how hard you spin it...Real journalists, the ones who belong in press conferences, know that access to a president is a rare gift, and they know enough not to squander it. Gannon threw away his opportunity in favor of self-aggrandizing partisan spectacle. He put himself and his agenda ahead of the public good, and he did it in a manner so egregious that he left little doubt of his intentions. If both sides of the debate, blinded by partisan zeal, don't realize that's the real reason he had to go, they've missed the point."
Montopoli cannot be serious. If anyone who asked softball questions at the White House "had to go," the White House briefing room would have almost emptied out in the Clinton years. The problem for Montopoli and other liberals is they seem to think that the need for an adversarial press emerged in 2001, when President Bush was first inaugurated. If we travel back to the Clinton era, it's not hard to discover a whole chorus of White House reporters who, to use Montopoli's words, squandered their access to Clinton with helpful softball questions, who put his agenda ahead of the public good and made a partisan spectacle of themselves in front of a large number of Americans who wanted the press to act as a watchdog of President Clinton.
Review the press conference transcript from March 19, 1999 — President Clinton's first solo press conference in almost a year (blame the Lewinsky scandal) and his first meeting with the press since the impeachment process crumbled in the Senate, and since Juanita Broaddrick charged on the February 24 edition of NBC's Dateline that Clinton had raped her in 1978.
After some questions about Kosovo and Chinese espionage came what liberals might call Gannon #1, Wolf Blitzer of CNN: "Mr. President, there's been a lot of people in New York state who've spoken with your wife, who seem to be pretty much convinced she wants to run for the Senate seat next year. A, how do you feel about that? Do you think she would be a good senator? And as part of a broader question involving what has happened over the past year, how are the two of you doing in trying to strengthen your relationship, given everything you and she have been through over this past year?" Clinton replied: "Well, on the second question, I think we're -- we're working hard. We love each other very much, and we're working on it. On the first question, I don't have any doubt that she would be a magnificent senator." That might be a question people would like to hear answered, but it definitely placed the Clintons' agenda ahead of the public's agenda.
After that came Gannon #2, batty Sarah McClendon, once the classic poster girl for the loose credentialing process at the White House. Reporters laughed when Clinton went beyond the front row to pick her as she yelled to get his attention. Standing to show her snappy navy-blue beret, McClendon asked: "Sir, will you tell us why you think the people have been so mean to you? Is it a conspiracy? Is it a plan to treat you worse than they treated Abe Lincoln?" That allowed Clinton to make jokes. I don't remember the Columbia Journalism Review huffing that she "had to go" and her hard pass should be revoked.
Then, the seventh reporter called on, ABC's Sam Donaldson, finally asked about Broaddrick's charge of rape, which Clinton circumnavigated and declined to deny. Donaldson followed up: "Can you not simply deny it, sir?" Clinton insisted: "There's been a -- a statement made by my -- my attorney. He speaks for me, and I think he spoke quite clearly. Go ahead, Scott." Scott Pelley of CBS changed the subject back to Kosovo. Using the usual liberal complaint that a Gannon lets down the public when he fails to follow up on a tough question that has not been answered, Pelley and everyone after him failed that test on that day in 1999.
After Pelley came Gannon #3, John F. (for Fawning?) Harris of the Washington Post: "Sir, George Stephanopoulos has written a book that contain -- contains some tough and fairly personal criticism of you. Earlier, Dick Morris had written a somewhat similar book. How much pain do these judgments by former aides cause you? And do you consider it a betrayal for people to write books on the history of your administration while you're still in office?" See how these reporters feel Clinton's pain? Tightening the press credentials won't solve the problem of long-established media outlets acting like tender psychoanalysts for liberal presidents.
Then came Gannon #4, Kenneth Walsh of U.S. News & World Report, who followed up on Clinton's feelings and reflections on his pain: "I understand that you don't want to speculate about what your opponents might do now, after the impeachment struggle is over, but I wonder what your feelings are, after some period of reflection, on the impeachment process, the -- how you were treated and if you feel resentment, relief, and how you think people will deal with this and see it 10 or 20 years from now?" To Walsh, the only question was about Clinton's opponents and whether the president resented them. He couldn't even ask whether Clinton considered his presidency or his legacy irreparably damaged by the impeachment.
Gannon #5 was National Public Radio's Mara Liasson: "Mr. President, your vice president has recently been ridiculed for claiming that he invented the Internet and spent his boyhood plowing steep hillsides in Tennessee. I'm wondering what you think of those claims and what advice you'd give him about how to brag on himself without getting in so much trouble." This allowed Clinton to say with a smile: "Well, you know, he came a lot closer to inventing the Internet than I did." He then went into an extended defense of Al Gore's genuineness.
That's just one press conference. We could lengthen this sorry list considerably with other examples on other dates. But by the current standards of liberal media critics, at the very least CNN, the Washington Post, U.S. News, and NPR didn't have "actual journalists" at the White House. The man named "Gannon" is an embarrassment, but that's no reason to shut out opinion journalists -- conservative journalists (even partisans) have every bit as much right to sit in those chairs and ask their own questions as the everyday liberal partisans do.
AI
