Hactacularama!

I’m busy today, but I did happen to just catch Howie Kurtz as he told Wolf Blitzer that the real Talon news story is that “liberal bloggers” went after “Jeff Gannon’s” personal life. (Jeff told Howie that he was being threatened and stalked.) Howie didn’t mention that it was the fact that “Jeff” wrote under an alias that led these bloggers to find his beefcake pics online and that he’d been registering domain names for gay escort services. Apparently, it’s impolite to reveal such things even when the person in question makes a living as a homophobic wingnut.

He and Wolf both agreed that the White House press corps is just full of fiery partisans and there is nothing wrong with them being allowed to ask the president questions. Furthermore, there is absolutely nothing wrong with someone who writes for a front group’s web site being allowed into the White House on a “day pass.” Howie said that in this day and age of blogging you don’t have to write for a newspaper or magazine to be a member of the white house press corps.

Ok. Any of you liberal bloggers in DC who would like to get into the White House and ask Scotty and Dubya some questions, feel free to just show up. According to Howie and Wolf there’s no general rule against it.

Update:

BLITZER: Welcome back.

There’s growing buzz here in Washington, as well as over on the Internet, about a White House reporter some say was acting on behalf of a conservative group.

Howard Kurtz of CNN’s “RELIABLE SOURCES” and “The Washington Post” joining us from “The Washington Post” newsroom.

What’s going on here, Howie?

HOWARD KURTZ, “RELIABLE SOURCES”: Well, Jeff Gannon is his name. At least that’s the name he uses professionally. It’s not his real name.

And he’s a reporter for a couple of online sites. He’s a self- described conservative journalist. One of the Web sites his work appears on is called GOPUSA. And he pretty much operated below the radar until he got the chance to ask President Bush a question two weeks ago. Let’s take a look at that.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

QUESTION: Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. Harry Reid was talking about soup lines, and Hillary Clinton was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet, in the same breath, they say that Social Security is rock-solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you said you’re going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KURTZ: Now, that question, Wolf, kind of put a target on Jeff Gannon’s back. A lot of liberal bloggers began digging into his background. In the last 24 hours, they’ve exposed his real name. They’ve raised questions about some sexually provocative Web addresses that he registered on one of his companies, but never actually did anything with.

And Gannon has now resigned from the two Web sites that he was writing for.

BLITZER: Is there any evidence that there’s a connection, that the White House put him up to this to throw these kind of questions whether to Scott McClellan or to the president? Any evidence of wrongdoing, first of all, on the part of the White House?

KURTZ: No evidence whatsoever. I talked to Scott McClellan about this today, the White House spokesman. He said, first of all, President Bush didn’t know who Jeff Gannon was when he called on him at that news conference.

But McClellan knows who he is. He calls on him at White House briefings from time to time. He says that there are a lot of people in the White House press room who have strong opinions and sometimes put them into their questions and it’s not his job as the press secretary to be deciding who can get into the White House and who can’t based on their political views.

Gannon, by the way, says, sure, he’s very conservative. He makes no bones about that. But he thinks that a lot of the reporters in the White House press room are liberal, and he provides some balance.

BLITZER: What’s the name of the organization, the news organization, he reported for. And what political connections did you discover may or may not exist to that news organization?

KURTZ: Well, he writes for a site called Talon News, which appears to be kind of a straight news site. But all of the stories that he writes also appear on a site that’s called GOPUSA, which, as you might expect, is a conservative site. In fact, it’s motto is: We’re bringing the conservative message to America.

And both of those sites are owned by a man named Bobby Eberle, who is a Texas Republican activist in the state of Texas. So the issue here isn’t really Jeff Gannon’s ideology. He’s the first to tell you that he comes at journalism from a conservative perspective. The issue I think is, should some of his liberal critics, these liberal bloggers, have started investigating his personal life in an effort to discredit him?

It’s fine to disagree with his politics, but did they go too far, I think a lot of people are asking, in dragging in some of this personal stuff?

BLITZER: I used to be a White House correspondent for many years, sat through numerous briefings. There are plenty of journalists that wear their politics on their sleeve, liberals, conservatives. What’s wrong with journalists having these kind of views, being advocacy journalists, if you will?

KURTZ: I personally don’t think there’s anything wrong with it, as long as they make clear what their views are, as Jeff Gannon clearly did.

A lot of people are questioning, well, why does this guy have White House press credentials? Because he doesn’t write for a newspaper or magazine. Everything he writes is simply online. But in the age of blogging, that’s hardly unusual. And he doesn’t have a permanent — what’s called a hard pass. He just gets cleared into the White House on a day-to-day basis, which is a privilege that is pretty much open to any journalist.

So I think it’s absolutely fair game to critique his stories, to argue with what he writes, to question his views. And he does that to other members of the press as well. But what precipitated his resignation is that he says that on behalf — out of concern for his family — and he told me last week that he had been threatened, that he had been stalked — this has gotten so personal that he felt he needed to step down as the White House correspondent for Talon News.

BLITZER: And it does come within the context of some of the other embarrassments, Armstrong Williams and some other issues, which we won’t get into right now.

But Howard Kurtz doing some digging, doing some reporting for us — thanks very much, Howard Kurtz.

KURTZ: Thank you.

Update II:

I hadn’t seen this earlier Kurtz Gannon apologia. He really doesn’t understand the implications of this whole panoply of payola skullduggery, does he? Or perhaps he does …