Gannongate
For anyone hoping to find out some racy details within the pages of Jeff Gannon’s newly published book, “The Great Media War,” you’ll be sorely disappointed.
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Gannon resigned as White House correspondent from the conservative Talon News in 2005 amid charges of right-wing bias, inexperience and salacious accusations about his personal life. In the book, he admits nothing, referring only to his “perceived sexuality” and “photographs said to be me in various states of undress.”
“In actuality,” he writes, “my personal life was dull compared to the fantasy world created by the Angry Gay Left.”
No, in the tome that’s part autobiography and part media criticism, he saves most of his sharp words for the
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liberals in the press corps.
Exhibit A for Gannon is Hearst columnist Helen Thomas, to whom he devotes an entire chapter. “I found her disrespect for the press secretary appalling and her partisanship annoying,” Gannon writes. “Having Thomas in the front row was tantamount to having liberal pundits James Carville and Paul Begala seated in front of the podium engaging the spokesperson in a debate.”
He says the first time they met, she “muttered” something critical about the Bush administration, and he often witnessed a “fascinated rite of ascension” in which new reporters would be formally presented to Thomas “like someone paying respect to a mafiadon.”
What of the episode he calls “Gannongate” that forced him from the press corps? Well, the former White House reporter says he “suffered only cuts and bruises,” although it began “because I violated the first rule of the White House press corps … that required all reporters’ questions to a Republican president to be hostile, accusatory and based on Democratic talking points.”
Of his nom de plume, he writes that his legal name, James Guckert, was “too ethnic and difficult for others to remember and pronounce. My name also had a significant ‘sounds-like’ downside that I suffered with earlier in life.”
But as for how he arrived at “Jeff Gannon,” the reasons are manifold: “I sought to keep my initials the same to wear the monogrammed golf shirts my mother bought me every Christmas. … The idea came from Gannon College in Erie, Pa., a school my brother once attended. … The name Jeff Gannon sounded simple and strong, like Wolf Blitzer, one of the greatest sounding names in broadcasting.”
