You hear about media conspiracies, but boy, you never really expect to see one.

We’re now up to three conservative journalists and columnists who wrote their pieces while on George Bush’s payroll — an arrangement they failed to disclose to their readers.

The president has announced he is shocked, shocked by the practice of buying good press. “All our Cabinet secretaries must realize that we will not be paying commentators to advance our agenda. Our agenda ought to be able to stand on its own two feet,” Bush said on Wednesday.

Fortunately, it won’t have to. Just in case FOX News isn’t sycophantic enough, the Republicans can also turn to Talon News, and its White House correspondent Jeff Gannon.

Here’s a sample of the kind of hardball questions Gannon asks in news conferences (cited by MediaMatters):

Thank you. Senate Democratic leaders have painted a very bleak picture of the U.S. economy. [Senate Minority Leader] Harry Reid [D-NV] was talking about soup lines. And [Senator] Hillary Clinton [D-NY] was talking about the economy being on the verge of collapse. Yet in the same breath they say that Social Security is rock solid and there’s no crisis there. How are you going to work — you’ve said you are going to reach out to these people — how are you going to work with people who seem to have divorced themselves from reality?

If MediaMatters’ analysis is to be believed, Gannon’s primary newsgathering tools appear to be Republican news releases and his computer’s CTRL, C and V keys. They cite one article where 54 per cent of the content was lifted verbatim from an RNC news release.

The beauty of this, for the Bush administration, has little to do with Talon News’ media empire; Gannon’s articles have an extremely limited distribution outside the right-wing echo chamber. It’s more knowing that, whenever one of their number is under fire in a news conference, they just have to throw the next question to Jeff Gannon and they’re home free.

Better yet, it doesn’t cost them a dime.