Marc Perkel Rantz

"I've made mistakes in my past," he said yesterday. "Does my past mean I can't have a future? Does it disqualify me from being a journalist?"

Gannon chastised his critics, breaking a silence that began last week when liberal bloggers disclosed his real name, James Dale Guckert, and a Web page, which he paid for, featuring X-rated photos of himself. "Why would they be looking into a person's sexual history? Is that what we're going to do to reporters now? Is there some kind of litmus test for reporters? Is it right to hold someone's sexuality against them?"

As for his critics, Gannon said: "People have said some of my writing expressed a hostile point of view" toward gays. "These people are willing to abandon their principles on the basis of trying to make me out to be a hypocrite. These are the same groups that cherish free speech and privacy."

John Aravosis, a gay activist who posted the pictures of Gannon on his Americablog.org, said the issue is not Gannon's right to be a journalist but his "White House access. . . . The White House wouldn't let him in the door right now, knowing of his background."

Aravosis said Gannon is guilty of "what I call family-values hypocrisy. Basically, he's asking the gay community to protect him when he attacks us."

Gannon resigned earlier this month as a reporter for two conservative Web sites, Talon News and GOPUSA, both owned by a Texas Republican activist. Gannon became a target after asking President Bush a question that slammed Senate Democrats and contained false information about Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

In the interview, Gannon did not dispute evidence that he has advertised himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort but would not specifically address such questions.

Dismissing speculation that he had a permanent White House press pass, which requires a full-blown FBI background check that usually takes months, Gannon said he could not get one because he was required to first get a pass from the Senate press gallery, which did not consider him to be working for a legitimate news organization. Instead, he said he was admitted on a day-to-day basis after supplying his real name, date of birth and Social Security number. He said he did not use a pseudonym to hide his past but because his real last name is hard to spell and pronounce.

Gannon said he began covering the White House in February 2003, at least a month before Talon News was created. He said he was then working for GOPUSA. Talon was launched as "a marketing consideration to separate the news division from something that could be viewed as partisan," he said.

Suggestions that White House officials coddled him or gave him special access are "absolutely, completely, totally untrue," Gannon said, adding that he was often among the last to be called on at press briefings and sometimes could not ask a question at all. "I have no friendships with anyone there. . . . The White House, as far as I know, was never aware of the questions about my past."

Asked how recently he was putting his photo on escort sites, Gannon said that "so much of this stuff" was "years in the past. . . . Anything that goes on the Internet is there forever," he said. "Every day I learn about another site where there are allegedly pictures of me."

Gannon says he was questioned by the FBI in the Valerie Plame leak investigation after referring to a classified CIA document when he interviewed the outed CIA operative's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson.

But he said yesterday: "I didn't have the document. I never saw the document. It was written about in the Wall Street Journal a week before. I had no special access to classified information."

Aravosis and other critics cite several examples of what they view as Gannon's anti-gay writing. Gannon wrote last year that John Kerry "might someday be known as 'the first gay president,' citing his "100 percent rating from the homosexual advocacy group the Human Rights Campaign" for backing a "pro-gay agenda." Gannon said he was just reporting the facts and playing off suggestions that Bill Clinton was the first black president.

In reporting on comments by Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) that legalizing gay marriage could lead to judicial approval of bestiality, Gannon made an issue of the fact that the Associated Press reporter who interviewed Santorum was married to a top Kerry aide and described the comments of gay activists as "predictable responses." Gannon said he was not taking a stand on the issue.

Other allegations, meanwhile, keep surfacing.

Aravosis wrote yesterday on his blog that an unnamed television producer says Gannon told him the Iraq war was going to begin four hours before Bush announced it.

Gannon chuckled at that, saying many reporters sensed an attack was imminent because the White House kept delaying the routine announcement that no more news would be made that day. "You could feel it in the air," he said.

Despite the battering he has taken, Gannon hasn't abandoned plans to work in journalism and hopes to generate sympathy by speaking out.

Conservative bloggers made a name for themselves by starting the process that led to the "Rathergate" scandal. They questioned the authenticity of some alleged National Guard documents that CBS used in a campaign to smear the President's military service. This was a real scandal, in which CBS backed away from the documents, an investigation was launched, and four people were fired from the network for their work on the story.

Left-wing bloggers have now made a name for themselves, and it is not pretty. They have taken the scalp of an on-line conservative journalist by the name of Jeff Gannon, who was virtually unknown until about three weeks ago. His crimes were that he was too pro-Republican, attended White House briefings, and asked questions unfair to Democrats. This became, for a group called Media Matters, the "White House press room scandal." Never mind that "journalist" Helen Thomas has been giving anti-Bush political diatribes disguised as questions at these briefings for years.

A massive left-wing investigation of Gannon's personal and business affairs was launched and was said to reveal that he was associated with some homosexual-sounding website addresses. Ironically, the Media Matters group is run by former conservative and once-closeted homosexual David Brock.

The Gannon "scandal" would be laughable, were it not for the fact that Gannon's personal privacy has been invaded and his mother, in her 70s, had to endure harassing telephone calls from those on the political left trying to dig up dirt.

The campaign against Gannon demonstrates the paranoid mentality and mean-spirited nature of the political left.

But the mainstream media did their dirty work, too. Liberal journalists at The Boston Globe, using material from Brock, weighed in with their own account of this controversial journalist and his employer, Talon News, owned by a Texas Republican activist named Bobby Eberle. Despite all the innuendo and controversy, the fact remains that Gannon had done some excellent political stories on a wide range of subjects, including the CIA and former Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle. Gannon could have survived the charge of having a conservative bias but when his personal life and family became targets, he decided to call it quits.

It all started when Gannon's writings were "exposed" for having too many statements taken directly out of White House press releases. Gannon apparently believed that covering the White House meant that he should actually report, in long and complete sentences, what the White House actually said on various public policy issues. He was also accused of tossing softball questions to White House spokesman Scott McClellan and the President himself.

You could see the imaginations working overtime on the left. They suspected that Gannon was another Armstrong Williams¯someone secretly getting federal money to promote the Bush line. Gannon had to be either a paid agent of the Bush administration or a phony journalist or both. In any case, in their view, he had to be exposed and discredited.

Was Gannon a Bush plant? Was he secretly on the White House payroll? The conspiracy theories were fed by the fact that Jeff Gannon wasn't his real name; he used a professional name because he didn't like the sound of his real name¯James Guckert.

"The left's whole focus is wrong in this case," Eberle told AIM. "This is a private company owned by me, with no ties to the Republican Party. We're on no one's payroll, except what I choose to pay people." Eberle has been running Talon News and GOPUSA for over four years. They send out news and commentary and "the conservative message" to about half-a-million subscribers a day.

Despite the Republican-sounding name, GOPUSA, no accusations of direct links to the GOP establishment or President Bush have turned out to be true. Brock and his allies eventually got Gannon's scalp because of the sex charges. These had nothing to do with his work for Talon News and reporting from the White House, and Eberle never conducted an investigation of Gannon's financial or personal business before hiring him. But the charges were embarrassing and apparently concerned some private issues that Gannon didn't want to discuss publicly. And despite what has been implied, he rarely wrote about anything related to the homosexual issue.

Eberle, a major practitioner of the "new media," apparently didn't realize that he was threatening the dwindling power of the old media. Gannon didn't realize that the purpose of the White House press corps is to make Republicans look bad. And when the left-wing media see their power slipping away, they go for blood and nothing is out of bounds. The political left doesn't respect personal privacy when the potential victims are conservatives.

Faced with criticism that the campaign may have had gone "too far" in personally attacking Gannon, as noted by Washington Post media reporter Howard Kurtz, some of the left-wing bloggers are saying that they were just concerned about security at the White House. How could the White House allow access to news briefings to someone using a pseudonym? Assuming this concern is genuine¯and that's a big "if"¯Eberle says that Gannon used his real name and Social Security number when applying for White House press passes. "There was never a deception," he said.

It remains unclear how Gannon got routine White House press access for nearly two years; he acknowledged he first began getting clearance to White House press briefings in early 2003 as a representative of GOPUSA, a group headed by Texas GOP activist Bobby Eberle—months before Eberle even created Talon News. Gannon said he had no access to White House aides outside the press room, nor did he try to interview any. When President Bush called on him at a press conference last month—during which he asked a question with false info about Sen. Harry Reid—"nobody was more surprised than myself," said Gannon.