The New York Times has one of the first mainstream news pieces I’ve seen about ‘Jeff Gannon’ that takes the issue seriously as a hard news story rather than just a ‘media story’ or a bias piece.
Of particular interest, to me at least, is just how ‘Gannon’ managed to have access to classified documents relating to the Plame matter. It’s not uncommon for journalists to get hold of classified materials. But given the dynamics of that story and how much the White House was gunning for Wilson, it’s awfully odd that he would have had this stuff come into his hands for what could at all be called journalistic reasons.
Given all these questions about credentialing and pseudonyms, I’m also curious how ‘Gannon’ was credentialed at the Republican National Convention, though the RNC certainly has every right to credential whomever they choose, with whatever name they want to go by.
As fate would have it, I sat next to him in the press stands during President Bush’s convention speech last September.
I didn’t know who he was; he didn’t know who I was. And that was probably a good thing all around. (I only found out his story when I looked him up later on the web, after what ended up happening; my recollection is that he gave me his card.) But that didn’t stop it from being a surreal experience. Through some sort of double karmic inversion, the women sitting to my left — ‘Gannon’, appropriately enough, was on my right … God not only has a sense of humor, it seems; he is also well-organized — turned out to be one of the protestors in the hall who lept to her feet mid-speech, tossed on a pink slip and began denouncing the president for about 1.32 seconds before being manhandled out of hall by some security guard who seemed to materialize out of nowhere.
I wrote about it that evening. The ‘journalist’ mentioned briefly at the end of the post is ‘Gannon’.
(ed. note: If you’re new to this story, this is the go-to blog.)
