Jeff Gannon in Washington, D.C., on March 24, 2005. A fan of the military, he lives a block from the Marine Barracks. Photograph by Nigel Parry.

One night last January, in the front room of his small, narrow apartment, in a building on the frayed fringes of gentrified Capitol Hill, Jeff Gannon took out a white tablet and sat down at his desk to write his question for the next day’s White House briefing.

By now, Gannon had been going through this routine for nearly two years, and he knew what he had to do. Getting called on was usually not the problem; once the White House press secretary, first Ari Fleischer and now Scott McClellan, had gotten through the first couple of rows—the network and newswire guys and reporters for the top newspapers, who got called on automatically, no matter how banal or predictable or liberal or disrespectful their questions—he’d get to him. But for the 48-year-old Gannon, that was never enough. His question had to stand out. It had to be punchy, distinctive, not something the “old media” would ask. It had to advance the conservative agenda, something about abortion or tax cuts or religion or the war in Iraq that his constituency, the people in the red states and counties of America, would care about. It should be friendly toward the administration, not another of the cheap shots, the gotcha questions, he felt everyone else asked. Ideally, it should be conspicuous enough to prompt a memorable response, or at least to make a point in itself.

And it had to call attention to Jeff Gannon. The daily question was all part of Gannon’s grand strategy not just to elicit news but to become a journalistic force in his own right. Now that he had re-christened himself “Jeff Gannon”—James Guckert was his given name—he had to create and extend what he calls “the Jeff Gannon brand.” Only a few years earlier, he’d been keeping the books at an auto-body shop in eastern Pennsylvania, and, if you believe his Web sites, hiring himself out as a male escort for other men. In a fit of patriotic fervor shortly after September 11, 2001, he moved to Washington, D.C., where he knew almost no one. But now, as the White House correspondent for an obscure operation called Talon News—actually little more than a collection of amateurs and true believers posting a hodgepodge of right-wing “news” items online daily for Bobby Eberle, a Texas Republican activist—he had become a fixture at the daily briefing. “Go ahead, Jeff,” McClellan would say regularly. Still, Gannon, someone who prided himself on taking risks, on always “leading the parade,” was impatient. All these talking heads on television during the 2004 presidential campaign were no better or more knowledgeable than he.

Gannon’s unrelentingly partisan, sycophantic shtick irritated some of the other reporters in the room. A few of them confronted him—“You really shouldn’t kiss up to these guys,” he says someone told him; “you’ll ruin your credibility”—while others shunned him or clammed up when he walked by. Dan Froomkin wrote, for The Washington Post online, that many in the press corps accused Gannon of lobbing “preposterous softballs,” and claimed McClellan would turn to him whenever things got rough. Others wanted him out of there, something that would be easy to do, since he got in only on day passes, not the “hard” credential that regular reporters had. But Gannon wasn’t about to change. The rolled eyeballs and gasps and groans—he took them all as compliments.