Obama's Blogger Moment Recalls Darker Episode

News Flash. Huffington Post wasn't the first new media blog to be formally called upon at a presidential news conference.

President George W. Bush and his press secretaries often looked for right-wing blogger Jeff Gannon (aka James D. Guckert) as safe quarter in the White House press room.

Gannon prided himself as "a conservative journalist embedded with the liberal Washington press corps" and would routinely toss the president a lifeline when questions from other correspondents strayed from the official line.

This alliance worked well for a White House press office seeking always to keep the media on message; Gannon was called upon up to a dozen times between 2003, when he secured daily White House credentials, and February 2005.

White House Gannon

But Gannon's run ended after a particularly partisan question about Bush's opinion of congressional Democrats who were, in his words, "divorced from reality."

A blogger investigation of his "reporting" at Talon News found that Gannon often lifted large portions from RNC and White House press releases -- verbatim and without attribution.

But that's not all. We also uncovered Gannon's apparent double life involving gay pornography Web sites that promoted male prostitution -- his own.

Moonlighting Guckert

Gannon soon departed but his residency in the East Wing was one in a history of media low points for an administration that put staged propaganda before real reporting.

So while Monday night's question was a buzz-worthy moment for bloggers -- and a proud accomplishment for the Huffington Post -- its precedent reveals the darker side of a new media world where the line between reporter and propagandist can get blurry.

Comments

[AndThenOneDay]

05:54 PM on 02/11/2009

A gay porn star. Perfect. A rare outreach by the Bush White House...

[NCRDIBULL]

12:18 PM on 02/11/2009

and as Dodd of MSNBC said today on Bill Press.. Obama picked his questioner­s ahead of time and wanted to through the extreme left (progressi­ves ) a bone while still giving a centrist answer .

[lovable]

11:18 AM on 02/11/2009

ari fleisher said on oreilly that bush never called on a blogger. again a lie was told and flisher was not corrected. that will happen for 8 years !!!!!! and the media will eat up the lies. thats how repubs will stay in the game. they are never exposed. by msm and they know it

[radiclib]

11:32 AM on 02/11/2009

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Right.
And Bush also called on ``Politico­,'' even asking the reporter from that web site to plug his business. It all looked and smelled like a set-up.
Good for HuffPost to be called upon by President Obama, and good of them to ask one of the better questions.
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[radiclib]

10:45 AM on 02/11/2009

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And nobody has ever explained how Gannon was allowed in.
Who signed off on him?
Was that person aware of his double life?
If not, why not?
Did anyone in the White House get any favors from Gannon aside from planted propaganda questions?
If Monica Lewinsky was cause enough to impeach one President, the least we can do is examine the sleazy dealings in the administra­tion that followed.
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[satyriasis]

12:52 PM on 02/11/2009

Good points. The MSM won't raise these questions, unless of course it is to undermine a Democrat..­..

[SeanGardner]

08:47 AM on 02/10/2009

Wow...so Sam Stein wasn't the first blogger to be formally called upon at a presidenti­al news conference­?

Well, either way, Obama calling on Stein is big for this site, for Arianna Huffington­, and to the legitimacy of Stein's reporting.