Find Jeff Gannon in the media whore family tree.

And a good explanation about how the right-wing media machine works from Campaign Extra.

Who is the conservative pseudo-journalist who calls himself "Jeff Gannon" and has a hard-to-get White House press pass, so he can toss softball questions at President Bush and rewrite press releases for a right-wing outlet called Talon News?
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We'd never heard until tonight of the Leadership Institute Broadcast School of Journalism, which apparently trains hundreds of "Jeff Gannons" every year. They were hiding in plain sight.

It wasn't new to me. I remember a number of articles about this. Here's info on their internships and you can get a list of their prominent alumni here. But back t the article at hand, specifically the part where they tie the whole conspiracy together.

There's one other thing that raises our curiosity about who or what is behind "Gannon." It seems that when he wasn't bashing Kerry, he paid a ton of attention to the Thune vs. Daschle Senate race in South Dakota. One blog that seemed to think "Gannon" was an authoritative journalist and linked to at least one of his reports was called "Daschle v. Thune."

If that name sounds familiar, it should. It later was reported that the author of the blog, Jon Lauck, was a former Thune campaign staffer and was paid $27,000 by Thune's 2004 campaign while he was producing the Web site.

The next paragraph summarizes what's really at work here and shows how stories are piped up the line, each time with a byline that gives them just enough credibility for the organization publishing the story to cover itself.

So let us get this straight: The top Democrat in the Senate loses a race where the GOP sets up a phony blog that passes along news reports from a pseudo media organization, written by a reporter given White House credentials under a fake name.