Becoming Gannon

Pittsburgh anchorman admits to teaching JD Guckert at Morton Blackwell's conservative media mill

via Philadelphia blogger Will Bunch at Attytood,

The conservative mole who's a Pittsburgh anchorman...and taught "Jeff Gannon"!

Pittsburgh anchorman Scott Baker posts at Arianna Huffington's new blog, The Huffington Post:

This is what I get for trying to teach a simple little seminar on media career strategies? Jeff Gannon as my star student? I had more modest goals. Most kids trying to dive into media careers fail miserably. So maybe I can nudge them with a few helpful ideas. Hoped for result: entry level job in, say, a small market television station. Not so hoped for: center square of odd journalism scandal.

The Vanity Fair article calls it a seminar for “aspiring right-wing journalists.” My mantra to the students involves getting rid of the “right-wing” and esteeming the value of solid day-to-day journalism. Good old-fashioned storytelling.

On the Leadership Institute, I'll just quote from our own Michael Dietz's piece, Becoming Gannon:

Just where Guckert learned the art of conservative positioning we have yet to determine. The Jeff Gannon bio at Talon News (since scrubbed) lists as his sole professional credential attendance at the Leadership Institute's School of Broadcast Journalism, though without giving dates. The Leadership Institute, whose mission is "to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative public policy leaders," has been in existence since 1979, when it was founded by longtime Republican Party operative Morton C. Blackwell. The institute claims to have trained more than 40,000 students in its quarter-century history, putting it at the center of a large network of right-wing activists, politicians, journalists and intellectuals. The Broadcast School, so-called, is merely a weekend seminar with a $50 registration fee: but the Institute sponsors any number of training programs, by no means all of them listed on its site, and provides a variety of fellowships and paid, residential internships to its aspiring conservative leaders.

Right-wing activist organizations are, of course, frequently interlinked. But the connections between the Leadership Institute, Free Republic (and its web radio project, Free Republic Network, created by millionaire Domino's Pizza franchisee Bob Johnson), and GOPUSA/Talon News are especially rich and suggestive. In August 2002, for instance, the Leadership Institute offered media training at Friva, the Free Republic in Las Vegas conference. A number of Talon News personalities made regular appearances on Radio Free Republic webcasts; it seems likely that the Leadership Institute offered a pipeline into the Free Republic Network, which itself was meant as a waystation to acceptance in more mainstream media. Jeff Gannon, for that matter, is known to have co-hosted a Radio Free Republic webcast with Chuck Muth, a Republican political consultant and one of the Leadership Institute's most prominent and active educators. And Muth's connections may offer us a path directly to whoever in the White House signed off on Gannon.

Baker's confession makes this interview look a little incestuous, doesn't it?

And JD wants everyone to know he really didn't learn anything from Baker:

With all due respect to Mr. Baker, what I learned about journalism was gained from having been the first editor of my high school newspaper and sports editor of my college weekly.  Somehow these facts escape those who are more interested in looking at headless photographs and spinning conspiracy theories.

OK, JD, if you say so.  That was what, over twenty years ago?  Really, though - your protests would seem a little less divorced from reality if you hadn't used the Leadership Institute as the sole journalistic credit for your Gannon character's entire career.