16:48 - 18 February, 2005
Rove-Gannon Connected?
This is major folks.
Gannon is to be on Anderson Cooper 360 tonight at 7PM Eastern
In a stunning development -- which We can't help but feel is related to the revelation last fall that Karl Rove was possibly behind Rathergate and (therefore) CBS News's recent decline -- CBS News has gone out on a limb and declared Karl Rove to be Jeff Gannon's White House Contact.
The article, originally titled "Rove Gives Warning to GOP," has just now been renamed, in the last few minutes, "Rove-Gannon Connection?" to emphasis that aspect of the story (which is not solely about Jeff Gannon) most relevant to the Gannongate scandal.
[What does that tell you about where this scandal is headed?].
According to the article,
[W]hen Jeff Gannon, White House "reporter" for Talon "News," was unmasked last week, the leap to a possible Rove connection was unavoidable. Gannon says that he met Rove only once, at a White House Christmas party, and Gannon is kind of small potatoes for Rove at this point in his career.
But Rove's dominance of White House and Republican politics, Gannon's aggressively partisan work and the ease with which he got day passes for the White House press room the past two years make it hard to believe that he wasn't at least implicitly sanctioned by the "boy genius." Rove, who rarely gave on-the-record interviews to the MSM (mainstream media), had time to talk to GOPUSA, which owns Talon.
The CBS theory would seem to fit, given recent revelations from Editor & Publisher and Raw Story that "Jeff Gannon" had a long history of bragging -- both to fellow journalists and even publicly, at the Free Republic website -- about his ability to get important news stories before anyone else had them.
One of the stories he bragged about having first, according to Raw Story, related to the so-called Rathergate (or Memogate) affair -- which dovetails nicely with the first sentence in this article.
[EDITOR'S NOTE: This story is developing
