Jeff Gannon. Journalist. Hero.

I’m not going to gloat about Jeff Gannon, I swear.

Nope. Not gonna do it.

Oh, hell, how can I resist?

Granted, tearing into Jeff Gannon and Talon News/GOPUSA.com is like driving my 1992 Ford Taurus over a lump of right-wing roadkill that’s already been hit by every 18-wheeler on the road. But honestly, the whole thing was an incident, the sort of which the Daily Show’s writers couldn’t have dreamed. Leaving out this guy’s sordid personal life, Jeff Gannon (a.k.a. James Guckert) was a “reporter” who wasn’t even cleared as a member of the White House press corps, yet managed to make it into the most heavily-guarded building in Washington on a near-daily basis. This raises the first important question- who was letting this guy in the door?

Gannon (I’ll use his pseudonym because I can’t type “Guckert” without giggling like a schoolgirl) was getting into the White House on what’s known as a “daily pass.” This is for visiting reporters, the type for whom a trip to the White House might be a once-in-a-career deal, or high school students who won a 500-word essay contest.

Real reporters have to go through a vetting process, including an FBI background check, to get into the White House. Even the Senate Press Gallery denied him a pass, citing questions over his press credentials (his host website was GOPUSA.com, for God’s sake- a right-wing rag sponsored by a Texas Republican named Bobby Eberle.)

However, Jeff Gannon was coming into the White House, since February of 2003, on a near-daily basis, billing himself as the “White House Correspondent for Talon News.” And I know the Secret Service doesn’t just hand those press passes out like lollipops. While I don’t trust the administration very much, I do trust the White House security apparatus- and their ability to find out things like whether you used to be a paid male escort for hotmilitarystuds.com. If somebody like that just keeps wandering in on a “daily pass,” you better believe that the Secret Service will notice.

To me, it’s obvious that the White House knew who this guy was, because the alternative is too unpleasant for the likes of Scott McClellan to contemplate. (“Really? He was a reporter for a site sponsored by GOPUSA.com? Well, WE didn’t know that. We thought he’d just gotten lost off the White House tour.”) When the Press Gallery at the Republican-controlled Senate tells you that your employer isn’t a real news agency, the White House should say the same thing- unless they know who you are, and want you to be there.

I’m not suggesting that the White House wanted the former star of a gay-prostitution website asking President Bush softball questions about whether the Senate Democratic leadership was “divorced from reality.” (I think that “divorced from reality” is an accurate term to describe the White House Press Office at this point.) But what I am suggesting, is that President Bush- influential Texas Republican- got a phone call, a while back, from another Texas Republican, Bobby Eberle who was running GOPUSA.com. Bobby asked George for a favor- give his “news service” its own White House correspondent. George (or, more accurately, George’s press office) found a way to do this that wouldn’t require the unpleasant publicity of digging up the reporter’s association with the aptly-named GOPUSA.com. Enter Jeff Gannon.

(Brief aside. Can you imagine what would have happened if, in the Clinton or a hypothetical Gore White House, a reporter- gay hooker or not- was found to be representing DEMSUSA.com or some such? FOX News would be so happy, they’d probably sacrifice forty goats to the Dark Lord, Rupert Murdoch.)

While the hypocrisy of a gay prostitute, working as a conservative “reporter” in the heart of the White House, is hilarious, it raises questions which are decidedly un-funny. Armstrong Williams, a conservative black columnist, was exposed earlier this year for receiving $240,000 to promote Bush’s education plan. It blows my mind. They were paying him off to publish rave reviews of administration policy in news outlets which were ostensibly independent. He even interviewed Education Secretary Rod Paige and encouraged other black journalists to promote No Child Left Behind.

I’m going to repeat this. The Bush Administration spent $240,000 of taxpayer money to bribe a journalist into promoting their policies. You better believe that “this column sponsored by the White House Press Office” didn’t appear on Armstrong William’s byline.

Of course, Armstrong Williams and his unfortunate sources of supplemental income weren’t the first Bush administration attempt to pollute the independent media with propaganda. (I’m not shying away from the P-word, because, honestly, that’s what it was.) They developed “video news releases,” meant to sound like the print kind- sheets of paper attributed to the White House, written like a news article and outlining a new policy or making some kind of statement. However, “video news releases” were filmed to look like real TV journalism- and didn’t make any mention of the agency that produced them. The General Accounting Office, one of the few Congressional watchdog agencies that retains teeth in this day and age, called the Bush White House out on it. It was illegal, and the GAO made them stop.

The fact is that unbiased research and reporting makes conservatives and their policies look really, really bad. Listen to the incessant complaints about the “liberal media” and conservative complaints about how colleges and universities are overwhelmingly left-wing. Think about it. Media outlets and universities are paid to sit around and carefully analyze the facts of historical and current events. They have codes of ethics (which do not condone getting paid off by the government to promote their agenda.) That’s all they do- learn from history and research what’s currently going on. And for some STRANGE reason, most of these organizations seem to have a liberal slant. Huh. That’s funny. I wonder why.

I don’t mean to extol the virtues of the modern media. They make mistakes and they screw up (look at poor Dan Rather.) But over the past decade, Republicans and conservatives in general have realized that their policies don’t hold up under the scrutiny of the professional media. This is not because the media is liberal. This is because an accurate look at the truth is liberal, and when the media reports the truth- about Iraq, Social Security, gay rights, evolution or health care- Republicans look bad. Via FOX News, “video news releases,” the bribing of Armstrong Williams or the illegitimate clearances of “Jeff Gannon,” it’s become very clear that a lot of conservatives in this country are afraid of the truth, so the answer is to broadcast lies.

I’m still making Jeff Gannon jokes, and so are my friends- my girlfriend told me today that she was sad about the whole affair, “because Jeff Gannon and Talon News were my source for unbiased and no-spin reporting.” But the whole affair lays bare a frightening conservative mentality- that if smart people are reporting something that’s not friendly to the way you look at the world, you should report the opposite, regardless of whether or not it’s the truth. And if you do that, your supporters will believe that your “news,” however morally and factually questionable it might be, is a legitimate alternative to what the real media is saying. In America, in 2005, the truth is bad news for Republicans, and Jeff Gannon was one of their ways to make it go away.

(Post script: For more on this, you should read Al Franken’s slightly-dated “Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them: A Fair and Balanced Look at the Right.” However, a current, better-detailed, and significantly less humorous look at this situation can be found at Media Matters for America, online at MediaMatters.org. I had to stop reading after a while, because it was too upsetting- and more importantly, too true.)