As you likely know by now, critics of the White House press corps don’t have “Jeff Gannon” to kick around anymore. Gannon, whose real name is James D. Guckert, quit his post at the conservative Talon News, a website operated by a Texas Republican Party operative, after coming under fire for recycling White House press releases into stories and lobbing softball questions at President Bush during news conferences. The most recent and arguably most egregious of Gannon’s questions included the false assertion that “Harry Reid was talking about soup lines,” something Gannon came to believe because of a joke on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, and concluded with the line, “How are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?” He asked the question without a hint of irony.
Spurred by the controversy, left-wing bloggers dug in and discovered that Gannon had registered domain names like hotmilitarystud.com. They defended their exposure of Gannon by pointing out that Talon News has run articles questioning what it refers to as “the homosexual agenda.” “He has been extremely anti-gay in his writings,” said Markos Moulitsas, who runs the Daily Kos blog. “He’s been a shill for the Christian right. So there’s a certain level of hypocrisy there that I thought was fair game and needed to be called out.” Conservatives, for their part, argue that the real hypocrites are on the left, who are “[savaging] someone for possibly being gay,” as redstate.org’s Krempasky put it.
Krempasky is obviously wrong here — charging someone with hypocrisy doesn’t automatically add up to homophobia — but Moulitsas isn’t in the clear either. There’s nothing that enrages partisans more than a hypocrite, and, in their zeal to take down an apparent first-rate one like Gannon, many liberals were blind to the ethical issues of exposing his private life. Gannon has every right to be gay and to aspire to become a pornography peddler (as some of the domain names he registered suggest) while serving as a GOP shill responsible for pseudo-journalism with an anti-gay undercurrent. It’s not unreasonable to judge Gannon for apparently holding personal views that don’t square with his public persona. But it is unreasonable to suggest that somehow his hypocrisy justifies thrusting his personal life into the public arena. One would think those on the left who value civil liberties might put a little more stake in one man’s right to privacy.
Gannon’s real crime isn’t hypocrisy — it’s his contempt for honest journalism. “I asked a question at a White House press briefing and this is what happened to me,” Gannon told the Wilmington, Del. News Journal. “If this is what happens to me, what reporter is safe?” We know that’s a hypothetical, but we’ll try to answer it anyway: Real reporters are safe. It’s just the ideological warriors masquerading as fair-minded journalists who should be wary. Some conservatives don’t see a distinction; according to Glenn Reynolds, “If working for a biased news organization disqualifies you, a lot of people have a lot to be worried about. If being involved in a dubious business venture is disqualifying, I suspect a lot of people have a lot to be worried about.”
But this isn’t a media bias issue, no matter how hard you spin it. (And there isn’t much these days that critics won’t try to spin as a media bias issue.) No one, after all, is trying to ban Fox News or Helen Thomas from the briefing room. Gannon asked questions designed not to get information from Bush but to demonstrate his allegiance to him, not to mention his disgust with Democrats and his own ostensible colleagues. 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.
–Brian Montopoli
