Citizens, it's finally happened. An alleged former male prostitute has been unmasked among the
White House press corps. If this comes as a surprise, don't blame liberal media bias. For once,
there's a Washington sex scandal our fastidious "mainstream" press mostly wishes to avoid.

Why? Good question. By day, "Jeff Gannon" posed as White House correspondent for a fictitious
news organization called Talon News, an Internet site that is a subsidiary of GOPUSA. com.
That's a Texas-based Web site bankrolled by one Bobby Eberle, an activist now depicted as virtually
unknown in Texas GOP circles, even though he was a Bush delegate to the 2000 Republican National Convention.

"Gannon" was granted day passes to White House press briefings and news conferences, where he
routinely lobbed softball questions to press secretary Scott McClellan. MSNBC's acerbic news anchor,
Keith Olbermann, almost alone among TV journalists in giving the story the coverage it deserves, has aired
hilarious pastiches of "Gannon's" servile questioning of McClellan on his "Countdown" program.

What does the affair tell us about White House security amid the "war on terror"? That's hard to say.
So far nobody's explained how a man with no journalistic credentials and a phony name passed muster
with the Secret Service. One reasonable presumption might be that a high-ranking White House official
must have vouched for him, but given the Washington press' reluctance and GOP control of Congress,
we may never know.

McClellan pleads no contest.

"In this day and age, "he said," when you have a changing media, it's not an easy issue to decide,
to try to pick and choose who is a journalist. "

Um, Scottie, how about somebody who has ever worked as a reporter for a newspaper, magazine,
TV or radio station? Most people would start there. Google" James D. Guckert, "our hero's real name,
and you won't find a long list of professional accomplishments. None, actually.

Among left-of-center bloggers," Gannon" already was notorious for simply adding his byline to GOP press
releases and posting them as news stories online. He'd also posted articles claiming that a former intern had
given interviews to TV networks revealing her love affair with Sen. John Kerry--something that never happened.
Even nastier, and ironically, given his secret identity, he'd attacked the Democratic presidential nominee as
potentially America's "first gay president."

But it was the slow-pitch meatball that "Gannon" lobbed to President Bush during his recent news conference
that really set critics off. Bush had just apologized for the Education Department's Pravda-style $240,000
payment to pundit Armstrong Williams for praising White House policies. Perhaps fearing that a real reporter
would ask a follow-up query about pundits paid to tout administration "pro-family" initiatives, or about
government-sponsored infomercials narrated by an actress playing TV reporter "Karen Ryan" that got broadcast
as news stories on many stations, McClellan called on "Gannon." "Gannon" delivered. Falsely attributing to
Democratic Sens. Harry Reid and Hillary Clinton statements about "soup lines" and an economy "on the verge
of collapse" that he'd apparently borrowed from Rush Limbaugh, he asked Bush, "[H] ow are you going to
work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?"

Bush's answer wasn't memorable. But a few days later, gay activist John Aravosis of Americablog. org revealed
"Gannon's" secret identity. Whining that his privacy had been violated, Gannon/Guckert quickly resigned. Later,
in an interview with media critic Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, Gannon/Guckert "did not dispute
evidence that he has advertised himself as a $200-an-hour gay escort, but would not specifically address
such questions," Kurtz reported.

As if to demonstrate that people on the cultural left often don't think any better than their putative opponents
on the right, online publications like Salon. com ran letters from gay readers denouncing his forced outing as
"homophobic." Excuse me, but when you pose for explicit photos and advertise your services on the Internet,
it's not private, it's public. More typical was Kurtz's complaint that "I didn't go into journalism, frankly, to be
looking at Web sites like hotmilitarystud. com." Well, frankly, I never expected to read anything like the
Starr Report. Try to imagine the uproar if the Bill Clinton White House had pulled something similar. Every
committee in Congress would run televised hearings 24/7. On "Hardball," GOP attack blondes would be
speaking in tongues. Tim Russert might simply explode. The bitterest irony, of course, is that Bush, the most
theatrically "manly" president since Ronald Reagan--he often dresses as if auditioning for the Village People
--might never have been elected but for his 2004 campaign's calculated appeal to homophobia.
 

Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.

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