Posted on 02/09/2005 11:10:04 AM PST by hipaatwo
Washington, DC - Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (NY-28), long time champion of media reform and Ranking Member of the House Committee on Rules, sent a letter to President George W. Bush today asking him to explain how discredited "reporter" Jeff Gannon was credentialed as a member of the legitimate media by the White House.
The letter follows: Wednesday, February 9, 2005 The Honorable George W. Bush President of the United States 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington, DC 20500 Dear Mr. President: In light of the mounting evidence that your Administration has, on several occasions, paid members of the media to advocate in favor of Administration policies, I feel compelled to ask you to address a matter brought to my attention by the Niagara Falls Reporter (article attached), a local newspaper in my district, regarding James "JD" Guckert (AKA Jeff Gannon) of Talon News. According to several credible reports, "Mr. Gannon" has been repeatedly credentialed as a member of the White House press corps by your office and has been regularly called upon in White House press briefings by your Press Secretary Scott McClellan, despite the fact evidence shows that "Mr. Gannon" is a Republican political operative, uses a false name, has phony or questionable journalistic credentials, is known for plagiarizing much of the "news" he reports, and according to several web reports, may have ties to the promotion of the prostitution of military personnel.
Several weeks ago when it was revealed that radio/TV host Armstrong Williams had received payment from your Administration in exchange for his vocal support of the 'No Child Left Behind' initiative, I was stunned. For years now I have been leading the fight in Congress for fairness and accountability in the media; the Williams revelation only underscored the need for a media that has integrity, is balanced and expresses the local interests and concerns of its consumers. Since that time, two more members of the media have been found to have received money from your Administration in exchange for their vocal, yet undisclosed support of Administration policies. And just this morning we have learned that "Mr. Gannon" has resigned his post at the, so called, Talon News amid growing concerns over his controversial background and falsified qualifications. In fact, it appears that "Mr. Gannon's" presence in the White House press corps was merely as a tool of propaganda for your Administration. Mr. President, I am sure we both agree the White House Press Corps is an honored institution in America that should be beyond the scope of partisan meddling, and that a free and independent media is the cornerstone of our success as a democracy.
Likewise, I am sure we can both agree the American people have the right to expect that journalists who question their President everyday are experienced, independent, and perhaps most importantly, unbiased in their approach. I was already concerned about what appears to be an organized campaign to mask partisan propaganda as legitimate news by your Administration. That we have now learned this same type of deception is occurring inside the White House briefing room itself is even more disturbing.
That is why I am asking you to please explain to the Congress and to the American people how and why the individual known as "Mr. Gannon" was repeatedly cleared by your staff to join the legitimate White House press corps? Mr. President, your Administration has driven the so-called "values" debate in this country. But the most important value for those of us in public service should always be honesty and integrity, particularly when considering the manner in which we conduct our affairs of state.
I would appreciate your prompt response on this matter. Respectfully, /LMS Louise M. Slaughter Ranking Member, House Committee on Rules
From the Niagara Falls Reporter on Monday, February 7, 2005 AN OPEN LETTER TO LOUISE SLAUGHTERDear Rep. Slaughter, As a small newspaper located in your district, we are asking for your help. It has come to our attention that an individual who calls himself "Jeff Gannon" has been credentialed by the White House to attend press briefings and presidential news conferences.
He is affiliated with an organization called Talon News, and is frequently called on by White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan and President Bush. This individual has no background in journalism whatsoever, and his "syndicated column" appears solely on his personal Web site, www.jeffgannon.com. According to the Philadelphia Daily News, "Jeff Gannon" isn't even his real name. In his biography at the Talon News site, where he holds the title of "Washington Bureau Chief," he claims to be a graduate of the "Pennsylvania State University System" and the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism. While the 23 schools in the Penn State system award diplomas, the system itself does not, and the Daily News investigation has thus far failed to turn up a "Jeff Gannon" who holds a degree in education from Penn State, as this person claims he does. Furthermore, the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism is a right-wing diploma mill where anyone with $50 and two days to waste can receive a degree. As for Talon News itself, it seems to consist solely of a Web site that links directly to a Republican site called www.gopusa.com.
Both Talon and GOPUSA have the same mailing address, a private residence in Texas. It isn't clear whether anyone at Talon News is paid, as one portion of its site asks, "Want to join the Talon News team? Click here to find out more about being a volunteer reporter for Talon News." Looking at the staff biography section of the site, none of the 10 individuals listed appear to have any training or previous experience in journalism, although all list credentials as Republican activists.
We respectfully ask your office to look into how a partisan political organization and an individual with no credentials as a reporter -- and apparently operating under an assumed name -- landed a coveted spot in the White House press corps. Sincerely, Bruce Battaglia, publisher, Mike Hudson, editor in chief, Rebecca Day, senior editor, David Staba, sports editor, Bill Gallagher, national correspondent, John Hanchette, senior correspondent, Frank Thomas Croisdale, contributing editor, Bill Bradberry, contributing editor, Niagara Falls Reporter.
Instead, she said, Gannon has had to get a daily press credential, which is much easier to get but must be issued each day. The White House Press Office has not responded to several requests for information on Gannon's credential status or why he is given daily press passes.
Hmmmmmm. It sounds like the "gate keepers" don't understand that THEY aren't in charge of the White House.
If it's easier to get a daily pass, why are they beotching?
Well we all know it's because it wasn't a liberal muck raker
( who THEY would have been GLAD to give a pass to.)
Judy Keen, a USA Today White House reporter whose tenure dates back to the first President Bush,
Reporters have "tenure"? Who knew?
LOL!
So Gannon says he doesn't know anything about GOPUSA; just another smear by the left, no doubt. Not that there's anything wrong with GOPUSA...but their attempts to link him to a blatently partisan site is quite transparent.
After he wrote the article about Paula Jones and Bill Clinton and has now changed sides just shows he has no core or room to call anyone biased. In other words, pot meet kettle.
Dear David Brock, Louise Slaugher and anyone else who still thinks left-wing news "reporters" get a free pass, wake up. It's a new day and a new way of reporting by ANYONE, not just your chosen few.
Thank you. I gave up drinking 5 years ago, but my mil moved in with us one year ago. A month ago I started drinking again. Make it a vodka and cranberry....double.. LOL
The Standing Committee of Correspondents.
Or they were doing the paying...they swung both ways in that administration, doncha know.
Item #2:
Catching up on some pre-Christmas developments on the Webster Hubbell front, former Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor admitted that he had indeed helped Hubbell obtain a do-nothing contract with the Los Angeles city government. But the networks ignored the news. Meanwhile, the husband of an ABC News correspondent came to Hubbell's rescue, paying off a foundation Hubbell defrauded.
-- "Kantor Admits Helping Hubbell Gain L.A. Fee" announced the December 14 Los Angeles Times story by reporter David Willman. He began his front page piece:
"A former member of President Clinton's Cabinet has for the first time acknowledged that he helped former Justice Department official Webster L. Hubbell pry loose a disputed consulting fee from the city of Los Angeles, months after Hubbell pleaded guilty to felony charges.
"Mickey Kantor, who served in the Cabinet from 1993 until last January, said earlier this year that it would have been 'inappropriate' for him to have gotten involved with the Los Angeles payment to Hubbell.
"But in sworn testimony to congressional investigators -- a transcript of which was obtained by The Times -- and in an interview, Kantor described steps he took to help Hubbell obtain the $24,750 payment from the city government in late 1995.
Kantor's aid is important because at the time, prosecutors examining the Whitewater affair were seeking the cooperation of Hubbell, who had been a law partner of First Lady Hillary Clinton and a close friend of the President.
"Those prosecutors now are also examining whether any of the payments Hubbell received were intended to discourage him from providing damaging testimony about the Clintons' role in Whitewater...."
Coverage of the revelation that a former Cabinet Secretary conceded "inappropriate" action? Zilch on the ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening shows, nor on CNN, not even anything on CNN's Inside Politics.
-- The day after the LA Times story, the December 22 U.S. News & World Report hit mailboxes. Tim Graham, the MRC's Director of Media Analysis, caught a very interesting item in the "Washington Whispers" section about how after spending the day failing to report the latest revelations about who helped Hubbell, ABC News reporter Linda Douglass arrives home where she can admire some paintings bought by Hubbell. Here is the U.S. News piece in full:
"When former Associate Attorney Webster Hubbell resigned from the Justice Department in 1994 amid allegations he skimmed money from his partners at the Rose Law Firm, many friends stepped in to help him bring in an income.
"The House Committee on Government Reform says Hubbell's earnings from June 1994 to January 1995 totaled $600,000, including a $45,000 grant from the Consumer Support and Education Fund. The Los Angeles-based non-profit hired Hubbell to write a series of papers about public service at the behest of its founder, John Phillips, a friend.
"But Hubbell never completed the project, and an embarrassed Phillips reimbursed the group the $45,000 out of his own pocket.
In a deposition given to the House committee, Phillips explained that when Hubbell was only able to pay back $10,000 of the amount owed, Phillips 'took security interest' in 21 pieces of art that hung in Hubbell's Washington home.
"The artwork, which includes signed lithographs by Grant Wood, Joan Miro, and Alexander Calder, now adorns the walls of the home of Phillips and his wife, ABC correspondent Linda Douglass."
~SNIP~
ABC's of Helping Hubbell
Former CBS News Washington correspondent Linda Douglass, now with ABC News, had a very unusual relationship with convicted embezzler Webster Hubbell: She and her husband John Phillips were close friends with Hubbell and his wife Suzy. In the May American Spectator, Byron York revealed that Phillips arranged for a consulting deal to cushion Hubbell, that Douglass and her husband paid for the Hubbells to join them on a Greek vacation and that Hubbell talked on the phone to Douglass from prison.
Douglass, a long-time Los Angeles television reporter, and her lawyer husband are old friends with Clinton buddy Mickey Kantor. While working on the 1992 campaign Kantor invited Douglass and Phillips to Little Rock where they met the Hubbells. In January 1993, York reported, they moved to Washington where Douglass landed a position with CBS News. The couple began having Kantor and Hubbell, whose wives remained in Arkansas, over for dinner. When their spouses arrived they joined in the frequent gatherings.
Following Hubbell's March 1994 resignation from his position as Associate Attorney General to face charges of embezzling from the Rose Law Firm, Phillips arranged for the Consumer Support and Education Fund, which he helped establish, to pay Hubbell $45,000 to write an essay on public service. "In August," York recounted, "the two families flew to Greece for a vacation." Phillips told House investigators that the couples agreed Phillips "would use his frequent flyer miles to purchase plane tickets for Webb and Suzy Hubbell, and the Hubbells would buy a full-fare ticket for Phillips's daughter. Phillips also paid to rent a boat on which the couples spent ten days visiting the Greek islands."
By December Hubbell had pled guilty to fraud and tax evasion charges. He never produced the essay, forcing Phillips to pay the $45,000 back to the foundation. Nonetheless, "even after Hubbell went to prison, Phillips and his wife kept in touch with their disgraced friend." Phillips visited and "Douglass also talked with Hubbell from prison" by phone.
Eventually, they lost faith. Douglass told York she had aided Hubbell "in a time of need. 'I went to church with Webb,' Douglass remembered. 'I was trying to help him with his personal redemption.' But Hubbell could not be saved. Of the end of the friendship, Douglass said curtly, 'Look, we were lied to.'"
If only a few more in the media would realize Hubbell has no credibility.
~SNIP~
You should have been on the thread last week regarding Brock's article about Jeff Gannon. Even some mainstream media sources cited the fact that Brock had a nervous breakdown (literally) and was not to be believed about anything.
BTW, earlier on the thread, I posted a link to a web site that posted a letter from the people who work at the Niagra Falls weekly paper. They wrote to Congresswoman Slaugher and asked her to investigate Gannon. Perhaps Brock did as well; I don't know.
marker bump
I see talon news articles posted all over the place...this dipstick needs to stick it
That is correct. I heard Rush and it was the day after I (coincidentally, I'm sure) had posted how I remembered watching Terry Moran on Court TV and how he was unfailingly pro-defense. The more whacked out the defense tactics the more approving was Terry.
Welcome, All4my kids! Please be apprised that there's a learning curve to all cyber forums and I don't just mean the "how to's". It can be addictive. Word of caution? Take no harsh words personally. Sometimes, whole issues are going on, and you'll walk into the middle of a brawl or debate. But, OTOH, don't take guff, either. Enjoy! Be Brave! Never stop being curious and learning.
Boy, they've sure been fooling us haven't they...
lol
"Jeff Gannon" and Karl Rove -- one degree of separation
Dirtboy Note - this is a weblog run by a Daily News reporter named William Bunch - and it has the Daily News logo on it. Here is the copy from the link:
Who is the conservative pseudo-journalist who calls himself "Jeff Gannon" and has a hard-to-get White House press pass, so he can toss softball questions at President Bush and rewrite press releases for a right-wing outlet called Talon News? We wish we knew. We're on the trail, though. Here's a few more interesting things about Gannon, whose unlikely West Wing access is shedding new light on the unseemly White House propaganda machine.
One thing is that there's an excellent chance he's a native Pennsylvanian (wouldn't you just know it?). His "bio" on the Talon News site states "Jeff is a graduate of the Pennsylvania State University System and holds a Bachelor of Science in Education." The vast majority of students who attend Penn State, either at State College or its many satellite campuses, tend to be in-state residents.
More interesting is that he and Karl Rove seem to share a mentor -- a largely under-the-radar wingnut named Morton Blackwell. It seems that "Jeff" also is a graduate of the the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism -- a conservative propagandist training school that was founded and is run by Blackwell and that operates on an $8 million annual budget which comes from God knows where.
Remember the lame stunt during the Republican National Convention in NYC where many delegates taunted war hero Kerry by wearing purple band-aids that said: “It was just a self-inflicted scratch, but you see I got a Purple Heart for it”? It was Blackwell, a GOP delegate from Virginia, who handed the band-aids out to the conventioneers.
Less well known is that Blackwell -- who was the youngest Barry Goldwater delegate in 1964 -- is also a former national executive director of the College Republicans, who had trained the teen-age Karl Rove to be a “field organizer.” According to a May 2003 New Yorker article, it was Blackwell who urged Rove to shun the growing reliance on pollsters and media consultants and go back to the grassroots. We all know how that turned out.
We'd never heard until tonight of the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism, which apparently trains hundreds of "Jeff Gannons" every year. They were hiding in plain sight.
There's one other thing that raises our curiosity about who or what is behind "Gannon." It seems that when he wasn't bashing Kerry, he paid a ton of attention to the Thune vs. Daschle Senate race in South Dakota. One blog that seemed to think "Gannon" was an authoritative journalist and linked to at least one of his reports was called "Daschle v. Thune."
If that name sounds familiar, it should. It later was reported that the author of the blog, Jon Lauck, was a former Thune campaign staffer and was paid $27,000 by Thune's 2004 campaign while he was producing the Web site.
So let us get this straight: The top Democrat in the Senate loses a race where the GOP sets up a phony blog that passes along news reports from a pseudo media organization, written by a reporter given White House credentials under a fake name.
Our head is spinning.
Will the propaganda fiasco become George W. Bush's Watergate? Stay tuned.
-------------
I'll compare this to the claims in the Niagara Daily Reporter article and see how it pans out.
Sure, but don't you think the "hard questions" should at least be based in fact?
The attacks on the president by the left-wing press are generally based on lies!
Well, they can wish for Watergate until the cows come home. The White House can hand out credentials to whomever it wishes to.
OK - here are the lies I can see here as compared to the Daily News blog by William Bunch.
According to the Philadelphia Daily News, "Jeff Gannon" isn't even his real name.
Bunch makes no such claim.
While the 23 schools in the Penn State system award diplomas, the system itself does not
Say what?
the Daily News investigation has thus far failed to turn up a "Jeff Gannon" who holds a degree in education from Penn State, as this person claims he does.
Bunch makes no such claim.
So we have two clear lies, along with a failure to note that Bunch runs a blog affiliated with the Daily News, but not part of the paper itself.
If the idiots who think they are digging up information on the Leadership Institute just read their website, they would find out they aren't hiding who they are.
******
The Leadership Institute's mission is to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative public policy leaders.
Founded by Morton C. Blackwell in 1979, the Institute identifies, recruits, trains and places conservatives in the public policy process.
The Institute produces leaders for a new generation of public policy leadership unwavering in its commitment to free enterprise, limited government and traditional values and equipped with the practical skills to implement sound philosophy through effective public policy.
More than 40, 000 trained
Over the past twenty-five years, the Institute has trained more than 40,000 of America's brightest young men and women for effective leadership in the public policy process.
The Institute offers 18 educational programs, an intern program, an Employment Placement Service and a Broadcast Journalism Placement Service to train young conservatives and then place them in public policy positions.
The Leadership Institute focuses on bright conservatives, on and off campus, who attend the seminars and workshops and participate in the Institute's programs.
President Ronald Reagan said that the Leadership Institute is "paving the way for a new generation of conservative leadership."
The Result
New generations of conservative leaders that will fight and win for conservative values in the public policy arena.
I don't know if it is a conspiracy per se. Like Rathergate, it is a combination of sloppy journalism along with a desire to see what one wants to see. Throw in the passalong nature of liberal blogs and the William Bunch account got transmogrified.
Now, I would like freeper advice as to how to best proceed with this story. The initial read was not entirely correct - there was a pseudo-Daily News story related to this story - and I can see an honest mistake being made if someone outside Philly who doesn't follow the Daily News doesn't realize that William Bunch's blog (he's a DN political reporter) is only loosely affiliated with the paper itself, since the Daily News logo is on the blog. However, there are serious errors in the attributions to Bunch's blog - at least two clear lies that I can see in comparing the Niagara paper's letter to the Bunch blog column.
I am going to research this further to see if I can trace how this got warped. I have a feeling that the details of the story were altered over two or three generational tellings on liberal blogs. Which would make a very interesting story on the problems with those blogs - problems that mirror Rathergate on a smaller scale.
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