A Sensible Leftist on Gannon(Welcome, Just One Minute and Croooow Blog Readers!)
The lefty bloggers are still spinning like tops on the Gannon story, but David Corn,
writing in the Nation (!) looks into it and is unimpressed.
Talon News was a fly-by-night (or phony) news operation with a political agenda. But White House daily briefings should be open to as diverse a group as possible. There is a need for professional accreditation; space is limited. Yet there is nothing inherently wrong with allowing journalists with identifiable biases to pose questions to the White House press secretary and even the president. And if such a reporter asks a dumb question--as did Gannon/Guckert (which triggered this scandal)--the best response is scorn and further debate. Bloggers should think hard when they complain about standards for passes for White House press briefings. Last year, political bloggers--many of whom have their own biases and sometimes function as activists--sought credentials to the Democratic and Republican conventions. That was a good thing. Why shouldn't Josh Marshall, Glenn Reynolds, John Aravosis, or Markos Moulitsas (DailyKos) be allowed to question Scott McClellan or George W. Bush? Do we want only the MSMers to have this privilege?Corn looks into the gay-baiting/hypocrisy charge and yawns:
Bloggers have made much of his apparent effort to earn a buck as a prostitute for men. This is not gay-baiting, they say, it's hypocrisy. The question is, hypocrisy on whose part? On Gannon/Guckert's? He's been accused of being a gay-baiter. But how true is that? As part of my investigation, I had my assistant, Alexa Steinberg, search through a collection of Gannon/Guckert's articles for pieces on gay-related themes. She found eight pieces. Most were straightforward accounts of political tussles over gay marriage.He comes to the same conclusion I did about the "Kerry First Gay President" article that Aravosis and others have cited as gay-baiting:
Gannon/Guckert clearly was writing for a conservative audience. But he was hardly a flame-thrower on gay issues. His observation about Kerry was clumsy but not homophobic. Sure, he worked for an organization that supported an administration and party opposed to gay rights, and he was a Bush-backer. But does that automatically qualify him for outing?The Plame Affair? Corn looks into it and finds the same thing that
Tom Maguire pointed out:
To ask the question Gannon/Guckert posed to Wilson, he did not need to possess that memo. He only needed to have read the Journal. It's possible he was leaked the same document. But the simpler explanation appears to be he saw it in the Journal.
