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"Part of our experiment was to test how Jim 'Jeff Gannon' Guckert gained access," Graff explained on his blog, "and we spoke with him to ensure we followed the same general procedure."

Gannon, writing on his own new blog, JeffGannon.com, congratulated Graff. "I wish him the best of luck," Gannon stated, while also criticizing the traditional media's coverage of Graff's milestone.

"The New York Times is hailing the first blogger to be issued a 'day pass' to a White House press briefing," Gannon wrote. "It goes to great lengths to play up his genealogical background in journalism, but fails to mention that the Vermont native served as deputy national press secretary on Howard Dean's presidential campaign last year.

"Hmmm," Gannon concluded, "no political ties there!"

The staff of Editor and Publisher challenged Gannon's criticism Monday in a post entitled, "Pot, Meet Kettle: Gannon Comments on First Blogger at WH Briefing.

"Gannon fails to mention that, whatever his political background, Graff is not currently employed by a partisan political organization (as Gannon was during his two-year stint at the White House)," Editor and Publisher stated. The E&P editorial did not mention Graff's current work for EchoDitto.com. Gannon's former employer, Talon News, is operated by a Texas Republican activist.

Liberal bloggers, such as Markos Zuniga of DailyKos.com, ridiculed Gannon as "a partisan plant using a fake name in the White House press corps." Others published photos of a nude male purported to be Gannon from a defunct website advertising an escort service.

Dean campaign paid bloggers to say 'positive things'

Garrett M. Graff's entry into the White House briefing room came just days after reports were published about two bloggers who were paid by Graff's former employer, the "Dean for America" presidential campaign, "to ensure that they said positive things about Dean."

Zephyr Teachout, the former head of online outreach for the Dean campaign, revealed the payments in a post on her blog, Zonkette.

"On Dean's campaign, we paid Markos (Zuniga of DailyKos.com) and Jerome Armstrong (of MyDD.com) as consultants, largely in order to ensure that they said positive things about Dean," Teachout wrote. "To be very clear, they never committed to supporting Dean for the payment - but it was very clearly, internally, our goal."

Armstrong has said that he was not blogging about the election during the time he was being paid by the Dean campaign. Both of the bloggers paid by Dean's campaign appear to have disclosed their role as "consultants" for the former Vermont governor's presidential bid to their readers. Nonetheless, Teachout now seems to condemn the practice of bloggers accepting payment from those they write about, irrespective of disclosure.

"I don't trust the framing of anyone who is regularly writing and speaking about people they are taking money from," Teachout wrote, "even if they told me about it regularly."

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