The E Pluribus Media group that have done the kind of exhaustive research that Corporate Media considers too expensive to bother with, have put together a profile of James Dale Guckert/Jeff Gannon. It's frontpaged over on Dkos:

Gannon, AKA James Dale Guckert, is about to ask the question that will strip the mask off who and what he is, crash fictitious "news outlet" Talon News and kick start demands in Congress for investigations into national security, White House access and definitions of media that are implied by his very presence in that room.

But Wait!

Before he asks that question ... Did we just say ... an auto body repair shop?

Yes, it's true. Guckert's path to the president reads like a modern-day
fairy tale on steroids. In less than twelve months, Guckert was catapulted from the position of office manager of family-owned and operated Karmak, Inc., in West Chester, Pennsylvania, to the White House briefing room, with a quick - but thus far unverified beyond Guckert's claim - two-day seminar at the Leadership Institute's Broadcast Journalism School.

Meteoric doesn't begin to describe such a rise.

Nothing in his professional resume would lead one to predict he'd be rubbing elbows with the cream of the American press corps, with unprecedented exceptions made for press pass qualifications, so that he could - on what must be the longest "day pass" ever - help the president out in a pinch or give predictable oral op/eds disguised as questions at hundreds of press briefings.


Nothing would predict that an avidly partisan website, GOPUSA, run by a
couple of well-connected Texas Republicans, would go to the lengths of
creating an entire "news" agency - Talon News - simply to justify
Guckert's non-qualified presence at briefings.

Let's take a look at that resume.

Landscaping. A public teacher's certificate. Office jobs. Two decades of kicking around the liquor distribution business in Pennsylvania and Delaware, and then ... leaving a friend's auto body shop in January 2002, to resurface in November of the same year as "Jeff Gannon," the "Conservative Guy," in a short, unpromising commentary on an obscure web site. And less than three months later, he would sit in the White House, Row D, center orchestra. Nice seat.

Read the rest of the linked story if you haven't already. Susan, Brian and the rest of the EPM folks are real journalistic heroes. They follow the story wherever it leads, and presenting the facts with tremendous efforts at research and diligence. (For a short period of time I was following the investigation in all its threads. As impressive as what they found was, even more so was the care taken to shield possibly innocent bystanders from being caught up in Jimmy-Jeff's wake unfairly.)

They're still unraveling more of the story. Fascinating as the mystery itself is, I think this investigation may well turn out to be as vital to US democracy as Watergate.

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