Gannon was later exposed as (1) a male prostitute and (2)a phony journalist who got White House press passes despite having no real credentials. He also had wide access to the White House (including after hours).
CBS tells some of the story here:
http://www.cbsnews.c...
Tired and timid are two adjectives never applied to Rove. The architect of the Bush victories in 2000 and 2004 came through the ranks of college Republicans with the late Lee Atwater, and their admitted and alleged dirty tricks are the legends many young political operatives dream of pulling off. So when Jeff Gannon, White House "reporter" for Talon "News," was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable. Gannon says that he met Rove only once, at a White House Christmas party, and Gannon is kind of small potatoes for Rove at this point in his career.But Rove's dominance of White House and Republican politics, Gannon's aggressively partisan work and the ease with which he got day passes for the White House press room the past two years make it hard to believe that he wasn't at least implicitly sanctioned by the "boy genius." Rove, who rarely gave on-the-record interviews to the MSM (mainstream media), had time to talk to GOPUSA, which owns Talon.
GOPUSA and Talon are both owned by Bobby Eberle, a Texas Republican and business associate of conservative direct-mail guru Bruce Eberle who says that Bobby is from the "Texas branch of the Eberle clan." ***
Some of the real reporters in the White House pressroom were apparently annoyed at Gannon's presence and his softball, partisan questions, but considered him only a minor irritant. One told me he thought of Gannon as a balance for the opinionated liberal questions of Hearst's Helen Thomas. But what Gannon was up to was not just writing opinion columns or using a different technique to get information. He was a player in Republican campaigns and his work in the South Dakota Senate race illustrates the role he played. It is also a classic example of how political operatives are using the brave new world of the Internet and the blogosphere. Gannon and Talon News appear to be mini-Drudge reports; a "news" source which partisans use to put out negative information, get the attention of the bloggers, talk radio and then the MSM in a way that mere press releases are unable to achieve.
One of Gannon's first projects was an attempt to discredit the South Dakota Argus Leader, South Dakota's major paper, and its longtime political writer, David Kranz. According to the National Journal, which reported on this last November, Gannon wrote a series of articles in the summer of 2003 alleging that Kranz, who went to college with Democratic Sen. Tom Daschle, was not only sympathetic to him but was an actual part of the Daschle campaign. These articles then got a huge amount of play on the blogs of John Lauck and Jason Van Beek, and were picked up by other conservative sites and talk radio. The paper was bombarded with messages about its bias and acknowledges that these had an impact on its coverage.
Daschle opponent John Thune's campaign manager was Dick Wadham, an old political crony of Karl Rove's; the kind of pal Rove could ask to hire his first cousin, John Wood, a few years back. Wadham put the bloggers on the campaign payroll and the symbiotic relationship between the campaign, the bloggers and "reporter" Gannon continued. On September 29, Gannon broke the story that Daschle had claimed a special tax exemption for a house in Washington and the bloggers jumped all over it. According to a November 17 posting on South Dakota Politics GÇô a site that Van Beek, who has become a staffer for now-Sen. Thune, has bequeathed to Lauck GÇô "Jeff Gannon, whose reportage had a dramatic impact on the Daschle v. Thune race (his story about Sen. Daschle signing a legal document claiming to be a D.C. resident was published nearly the same day Thune began to run an ad showing Daschle saying, "I'm a D.C. resident) has written an analysis of the debacle."
Daschle aides told Roll Call, "This guy (Gannon) became the dumping ground for opposition research." The connections are so strong that there is an FEC challenge which could be a test case on the limits of the use of the Internet in federal campaigns.
Gannon also had Thune on his radio show "Jeff Gannon's Washington," and the White House correspondent for Talon became touted as the "resident D.C. expert on South Dakota politics" by the bloggers. Thune and Wadham (who has been hired by aspiring White House Republican Sen. George Allen) have become go-to guys on the use of blogs in campaigns. ***
This week Democrats, who have serious case of Rove envy, went a little nuts and started sending around information and graphic pictures of Gannon and his porn Web sites. But it is the more routine part of Gannon's life that deserves serious scrutiny. Planting or even just sanctioning a political operative in the WH press room is a dangerous precedent and Karl Rove's hope to become a respected policymaker will be hampered if the dirty tricks from his political past are more apparent than his desire to spread liberty around the globe.
A more detailed analysis from this blogger below asks a lot of good questions about Gannon:
So no, as we at The Advocate have said here a hundred times, it's not just the fact that the White House abrogated its usual credentialing and security procedures to allow a gay whore using a false name and working for a known Republican activist website to come into the White House briefing room and throw "lifelines" to the President and his Press Secretary--no. It's not just that.It's that, as other news outlets have reported, there's reason to believe confidential and/or vital opposition research documents were released to Gannon by sources inside the Republican Party--apparently not just in Washington, but perhaps in South Dakota as well. And that sort of coordination explains precisely why a Congressional investigation is needed into how the hell this man got into the White House, using an alias, without any journalistic credentials or even a legitimate news operation behind him.
http://nashuaadvocat... (It repeats the CBS material)
Finally, here are two stories from Gannon at Talon News one can still find in the internet archive. Most other traces of GannonGÇÖs work for Talon have been erased from the websites that were sponsoring it.
I do not have access to everything Gannon wrote, and have only looked at a few stories, but can anyone tell me what these two ledes have in common?
Papers Show 'First Black President' Ignored Rwanda Genocide
By Jeff Gannon
Talon News
April 2, 2004WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- Recently declassified documents show that President Clinton knew of the genocide that was occurring in Rwanda much earlier than he has repeatedly said.
Papers obtained by the National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute, reveal that Clinton and other high-ranking officials in his administration were aware of the slaughter that eventually took the lives of 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus in the African nation a full month before they began to publicly comment about it.***
Daschle Asks Native American Not to Run Against Him
By Jeff Gannon
Talon News
April 2, 2004(Talon News) -- The Senate race in South Dakota got more complicated Monday with the entry of a third party candidate. Originally, Tim Giago, a member of the Lakota tribe, planned to challenge Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD) for the Democratic nomination, but instead has decided to run as an independent in the November election.***
Did Wadhams have anything to do with the writing of these types of stories? We'll probably never find out, just as we'll never find out how Gannon got such significant access to the White House.