MIKE PESCA: By now, you may have heard that the governor of New Jersey is gay. No, wait -- I'm sorry. Test marketing shows the more palatable phrase to be: I am a gay American. Which, of course, caught the world and the press corps off guard. Not that he was gay. If you talk to the press in New Jersey, they'll tell you "Oh, I heard those rumors. But they were just rumors." What caught everyone off guard was that McGreevey would admit it. Now, if McGreevey had said "I am a corrupt American," that wouldn't have caught everyone off guard. Since that announcement, we've heard details about a relationship between the governor and Golan Cipel, the Israeli national who McGreevey picked to head New Jersey's homeland security department and who's now suing McGreevey. To help us sort all this out is Bob Hennelly, the New Jersey correspondent for WNYC. Welcome to On the Media, Bob.

BOB HENNELLY: Hi.

MIKE PESCA: Bob, do you think that mainstream news organizations, because they didn't want to out someone, wound up giving the governor a pass, almost?

BOB HENNELLY: I think what happened was the trajectory of Golan Cipel, who of course has been named by anonymous sources as the individual Governor McGreevey was referring to -- the fact that he had such a short tenure in state government and was out in a matter of months, made the media feel that they had done their job, and so really, at that point, it became a personal matter.

MIKE PESCA: The news media, you're saying, didn't force themselves to discover every aspect of why he was drummed out. The fact that he was gone was enough for them.

BOB HENNELLY: I think they felt, yeah, that he's out the door, and at this point, there's no reason in going after it. It is a private matter. I think the media referred to Cipel as, quote, the "special friend." I think that if you read the papers every day, like a good citizen, you would have come to the point of saying "This is strange."

MIKE PESCA: Well, now as you say, they used euphemisms like "special friend," which in the '50s was known to mean that it was a homosexual relationship. Are you saying the reporters who reported those stories strongly suspected that what was up was the governor was gay and doing lots of things to cover his tracks --and putting out hints to that effect?

BOB HENNELLY: All they were trying to establish was that this relationship made no sense on the ground; that the individual's resume did not hold up to the scrutiny that was required for this very important job. And day after day, they stayed on it. They even stayed on him to the point when he went down in terms of job level, although his pay stayed the same, as a special counsel to Governor McGreevey, and then they even pursued him as he got jobs on what we call State Street, which would be, you know, the equivalent of Lobbyist's Row in Washington, DC. So there was an attempt to try to, within taste, I think, make the situation available to readers to at least have some perception about.

MIKE PESCA: Did people ever put the question to Governor McGreevey, "Are you having a relationship, an affair with Golan Cipel?"

BOB HENNELLY: I know that there was a reference in the New York Times this past week to an unidentified reporter. I put that question directly to the press secretary who was there for the last year and a half. He said that he knows of no one that, on the record, asked the governor that question. There were a couple of names that popped up where people said on Press Row, in the State House, "So and so may have asked. I tracked it down, and they said they haven't." So we're still in pursuit of that person who would have been so pressing. There was a, a whole pattern of kind of corruption stories that had popped up and bad appointments that were there as part of the background for this story. So I think to some degree, one might say that Governor McGreevey has really had a new innovation where coming out was the, the most brilliant stroke of genius that you can imagine, because it totally dazzled the national media, which went for the question of his sexuality, which of course is what they're trained to do.

MIKE PESCA: But to what effect? How did it wind up helping McGreevey? Can it salvage his political career?

BOB HENNELLY: Not salvage, by certainly give him a controlled exit, and that's the thing. He has said that he is going to have a transfer of power that will end on November 15th. Well that's, you know, some 90 days to transfer power. Well the federal government has a transfer of power that's 80 days, and that's the last standing superpower. So it appears he's hanging in there. I think that what's interesting is that just a few days after this disclosure, Governor McGreevey's major campaign giver, Charles Kushner, a major developer and giver to the Democratic Party nationally, was convicted of multiple counts of income tax evasion, tampering with witnesses, and he'll probably get two years in jail. So, in essence, he's taken control of the media agenda. So now the likes of Oprah and Barbara Walters want to talk with him about his -- sexuality.

MIKE PESCA: [LAUGHS] Well, thank you very much, Bob.

BOB HENNELLY: Hey, thanks, Mike.

MIKE PESCA: Bob Hennelly is New Jersey correspondent for public radio station WNYC, which also produces this program. [MUSIC]

MIKE PESCA: Up next, how to mislead without lying, how John Kerry would change the direction of the FCC, and detente between India and Pakistan leads to a meeting of the musicals. This is On the Media, from NPR.