O’REILLY: George Bush came in with a list of guys he was going to call on?FLEISCHER: Yes, I used to prepare it for him. I would give him a grid, show him where every reporter is seated. And there are some reporters, you know, in that briefing room, you can imagine, Bill, you get a lot of dot coms and other oddballs who come in there. They’re screened.
O’REILLY: Like the Huffington Post. Now it gets called on.
FLEISCHER: And I used to seat them all in one section. I would call it “Siberia.” And I told the president, “Don’t call on Siberia.”
Take, for example, case of Jeff Gannon, the male escort-turned-White House correspondent for the right-wing news outlet Talon News. The White House press office granted Gannon access to the White House under an assumed name and with no background check. Once Gannon got in the door under Fleischer’s watch in 2003, he was called on by Bush at a press conference in January 2005. Gannon lobbed Bush a softball:
GANNON: Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. … Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. … [H]ow are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?
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