Inside the White House Press Corps
WASHINGTON – Several years ago I was sitting at a hotel bar in Waco, Texas, with Ron Hutcheson, then the White House correspondent for the old Knight-Ridder News Service, simultaneously watching the Daytona 500 and competing in a video trivia game.
Naturally the discussion turned to the job of covering the president of the United States, George W. Bush, who was at that moment busily clearing brush out at his ranch in nearby Crawford, Texas, leaving reporters with little to do but watch race cars circle a track, answer dumb questions and drink beer.
“Hutch,” deservedly one of the most respected members of the corps, took that opportunity to offer a most straightforward description of what it’s like to be a White House correspondent.
“The best part of the job,” he said, “is telling people you have it.”
Indeed, unless your idea of fun is working with dozens of others congregated in an area about the size of a Metro car, tripping over television wires with almost no access to the individual you’re supposed to be bird-dogging on a minute-by-minute basis, then being a White House correspondent probably isn’t the job path you ought to seek.
Yet it’s almost unheard of for anyone to decline. Only the best – present company excluded – get the job and, as Hutch said, you can lord it over everyone else. So when the brass at Scripps Howard News Service ordered me to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in 2000 I raced over before they could change their minds. I stayed six years.
One of the first things a new correspondent discovers is that the White House press corps remains one of the world’s last remaining caste systems, something that seems to be modeled after the raj days in India. It’s the networks, along with heavy journalism hitters like The Washington Post and The New York Times, that call the tune while almost everyone else scrambles to collect the crumbs off the floor.
Correspondents are only visitors in the White House – there’s nothing in the First Amendment that says the nation’s chief executive has to turn over a section of his crib to a bunch of ill-mannered ne’er-do-wells with no viable job skills just so they can pepper him or his staff with unwanted questions. Most negotiations regarding accessibility and opportunity are conducted between the office of the White House press secretary, that being Jay Carney, a former scribe himself, and the White House Correspondents Association, currently headed by Ed Henry of Fox News.
Those two outfits iron out most problems that arise although, reporters being reporters, most of them just swear loudly and repeatedly about any perceived inconvenience and move on. Things like a spot in the 49-seat James S. Brady Press Briefing Room – built over the old White House pool — are coveted and held on to like you would grasp your baby’s hand on a crowded street. The correspondents association makes the seating assignments. When one opens up, if a news organization, for instance, determines it no longer desires to cover the White House – an occurrence of increasing frequency – a high-stakes scramble to grab the available chair ensues between those organizations that heretofore had to stand in the wings.
Face time with the press secretary or his/her representative arrives once, sometimes twice, a day in the briefing room if the president is in town. If he’s traveling, the press secretary will take questions from those on Air Force One in a format known as a gaggle – informal, nuts-and-bolts with no video cameras.
Ari Fleischer, while he was President George W. Bush’s press secretary, often held morning gaggles in his office, later moved to the briefing room when space proved tight. Recently, Carney noted a number of correspondents have requested that off-camera gaggles be held more frequently, adding, “I’m happy to oblige.”
“We’re going to do this — for those of you who aren’t familiar with it — kind of try to, in keeping with tradition — efficient, no seven questions for members of the first row before we get to move it around,” Carney told members of the press corps on Jan. 24. “Maybe one way that I think this has been done is sort of one topic per person so we can move around, try to do this in 20 minutes, and so you guys can get back to work.”
There have, on occasion, been other opportunities with few restrictions, especially during the administration of President Bill Clinton when press secretary Mike McCurry would attempt to sneak out for a quick smoke and provide answers to questions with a quick wit.
(Most correspondents, for what it’s worth, consider McCurry the gold standard when it comes to press secretaries even though he would sometimes complain to the bosses of those he felt were not giving the administration a fair shake. All press secretaries have been known to do that.)
A formal press briefing usually is slated for early in the afternoon. Carney and others before him take questions from correspondents in the front two rows where the power hitters are found before recognizing the proletariat in the back. Basically, these sessions begin and end on the press secretary’s whim.
Occasionally there are fireworks. David Gregory of NBC News famously got into it hot and heavy with Scott McClellan, Fleischer’s successor, during a briefing after Hurricane Katrina.
A little more than a year ago, acting on complaints from some members of the press corps, the White House Correspondents Association met with Carney to voice concern about instances of harsh treatment. The Washington Post reported that one of those instances involved Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, who revealed on Oct. 4, 2011, during an interview on The Laura Ingraham Show, that “a guy from the White House…literally screamed at me” regarding her reporting on Operation Fast and Furious.
“They think I’m unfair and biased by pursuing it,” she said.
And then there’s pool duty, which occurs in various forms. If the president meets with some dignitary in the Oval Office – which is smaller than it looks – the entire White House press corps couldn’t cram into the room with a shoehorn. Therefore, about once a month, perhaps more frequently, news organizations representing print, television and radio media pull pool duty. Representing the entire correspondents association, the pool is hauled into the office to witness the occasion and almost immediately hauled out. Sometimes the president and his guest even deign to answer questions. The event is faithfully reported by the pool with the information distributed to interested media parties.
But that’s not all the pool does. Sometimes, for instance, the president gets hungry and decides to roam outside the confines of the White House. Or he has an in-town fundraiser he needs to attend or he wants to go to a party at someone’s private residence. In such an event, the pool tags along just in case something of consequence happens.
It hardly ever does. Meaning the pool sits away from the action and waits. And waits. And waits.
Bush, for instance, has a famous taste for Tex-Mex fare and would occasionally set out to partake, leaving the pool parked outside while he enjoyed the chili rellenos inside. On such occasions, the pool had about as great an opportunity to catch a glimpse of the most powerful man in the world as someone passing by on her bicycle.
Presidential press conferences are a bit different. News organizations must request permission to attend and their representatives are seated, usually in the East Room, wherever the staff wants them to sit.
During one such occasion relatively early in his first administration, Bush revealed a secret that had long been suspected – the press office provided him with a list of which correspondents to call on – presumably those who might be considered safe.
” Sharyl Attkisson of CBS News, who revealed on Oct. 4, 2011, during an interview on The Laura Ingraham Show, that “a guy from the White House…literally screamed at me” regarding her reporting on Operation Fast and Furious.”
Is that why the majority of the media avoided in-depth investigation and reporting on “Operation Fast and Furious”?
Yes. Today’s TV-centric mass media news lives on two things: sensationalism and celebrity. If you can’t make a story sexy (i.e. sex scandal or dead people) you have to rely on getting famous people to agree to interviews. Fast & Furious, while it had dead bodies, was a while ago, and it’s hard to make an investigation that consists of memos/emails and meetings look sexy enough. So you need to score the big “sit down” interview with the President. If you piss off the administration, they won’t agree so your ratings (and ad revenue) dries up.
If you perceive your ratings depend on which celebrity butts you can get in the chair, the market is in who can lob the easiest softballs.
Yes, I agree with the suggestion of celebrity culture. But the problem goes much deeper. The press corps is mostly ideological or illiterate in political theory. For instance, the omnipresent use of the word “totalitarian” to describe both Nazism, Italian Fascism, and Communism. I tried to clear up the confusion here: http://clarespark.com/2013/02/02/totalitarianism-polarization-and-single-issue-politics/. Most recipients of White House news think that totalitarianism is only about statism. It is not: is about total revolution and “the breakthrough” to utopia. Whether or not the Obama administration is simply left-liberal or on the road to Leninism, is unknown to such reporters. It was a German far Rights, Ernst Nolte, who equated the Nazis and Soviets in order to exonerate Nazism from its unique horrors.
Clare,
I don’t know Sh$t about Nolte. I do know that Nazism has nothing to do with far right. The Founders were far right, largely libertarian, pure freemarket people, most of them religous.
Nazis embrace none of those traits. Nazism is a hybrid offshoot of Marxist thought where state control is paramount and xenophobia is part of the national psyche.
It’s important people know fact from fiction. I’m certain you agree.
It would be nice if people would read Hitler’s 1927 1st of May speech.
From Toland’s biography:
“We are socialists, we are enemies of today’s capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions”
The worst bit of disinformation from the USSR was that diseminated far and wide was that fascist socialists were “right wing”.
Somehow that reasoning never applies when a Republican is president. The left wing reporters at WaPo could care less what Richard Nixon thought when they went after him over Watergate, or what President Bush thought when they went after him over anything and everything. No one died of Watergate, it was an obscure break-in but the left wing media still somehow thought that story was sexy enough to put it in the news night after night after night.
How convenient. Atkisson of Obama shill CBS tells conservative talk show host the WH screamed at her. Think like a Marxist people. Atkisson did her part. Making it look like there were some MSM who were doing their jobs and not letting Obama off the hook Result? See, you right wing nutjobs, Obama doesn’t own the media, this brave lady is getting yelled at. Ha. Atkisson was following orders.
After Atkisson’s performance, no one could accuse all of American Pravda of suppressing the truth on F and F. Atkisson would have never revealed this tidbit to Laura without WH approval. It was a twofer-first, it’s a warning to other investigators, back off or you’ll soon be unemployed and it made Atkisson look legit, and independent when all she was doing was the bidding of her news editor who in turn gets his orders from WH.
Which members of the MSM get treated the best? Obviously, the ones with the brownest noses, of course. Now there’s a hard job for someone at the White House. Given the drooling adoration 99.9% of them have for President Petulant, how does one discern differences in shades of brown on all those noses?
The current WH press corps should be collecting unemployment insurance!
Yeah! Just like the rest of the country.
Getting yelled at is part of the job. I wouldn’t mind it at all. As is said ‘you know you are over the target if you are getting flack’.
The lap dog press really does a good job these days. Why, in looking back on “Iran-Contra” and “water boarding” and “firing U.S. Attorneys” I can see the current crop of the Administration Press is doing just fine…for the Pres. After all, Operation “Flubbed and Forgotten” just didn’t get a lot of front page press. No one was indicted, no one went to jail, and I don’t think anyone even got fired. Great reporting. Benghazi? What, some one complained about a video? Oh, and an Ambassador and three other Americans got caught in the cross-fire? Oh well, too bad.
It’s amazing how journalistic curiosity turns on and off like a light switch depending on which party is in the White House. And how the NYTimes loves to compromise military security when Bushitler is in office, but can keep a secret when Obambi asks for it. Can you imagine what the media would have done if a Republican Sec of State had said “What does it matter?” in response to explaining why the State Department issued bulls**t statements concerning an attack on a provisional embassy that led to the death of an ambassador and three other Americans?
How about the diligence that the press showed when repeatly connecting the dots (imaginary ones I might add) on how Bush the Inept screwed up royal in disaster response to Hurricane Katrina, but nary a story about the thousands getting f**kd in the aftermath of Sandy four months later? How the press couldn’t find a story concerning a Democratic presidential candidate’s affair and love child when it was dropped in their lap, but could drop 40 stories in 24 hours about a Republican candidate based on an anonymous tip about a harassment allegegation that was over 10 years old and never prosecuted?
The list could go on forever. I’m getting angrier as I type. I now tell people I don’t watch network news because I’d like to hear all of the news not just what they decide I need to know.
At least today, thanks to alternative media, you can know about other stories that the MSM has spiked.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, there were no alternative media, and the three nightly news shows from CBS/NBC/ABC commanded a majority of the viewing puoblic. Goodness knows which stories got spiked then which we never got to hear about anywhere else either.
I remember that Ben Wattenberg (a Truman-type Democrat) remarked in the late 1970s that CBS/NBC/ABC never reported even one story about the huge Soviet military buildup. So that when a candidate like Reagan (or even a Democrat like “Scoop” Jackson) came along to warn that the military balance was tipping against America, it was easy for the public to get the impression that these men were just paranoid warmongers or something.
True, the professional strategic media–Institute for Strategic Studies, Janes’ Fighting Ships, etc.–were reporting on it a lot. But without the Internet, back then you could only read that stuff at a public library.
The only way conservatives will ever get good coverage, is to own the media. Set up a fund and buy NBC, CBS ,ABC, CNN. then put your own people in to get your message out. It is the only way!
Given that the press has lost its ability to be curious or ask meaningful questions on relevant issues like Benghazi,and given that the media in general is a tool of the left, an arm of the Democrat party, I have learned to tune them out. When I happen to see a story I always analyze it for what it contributes to the Democrat narrative.
Brand name media entities are so transparent, it’s laughable. Their collective sophistication is at about a sixth grade level. That puts them two grade levels ahead of a majority of the electorate in the US.
Sunset on America.
A huge storm is coming. Before the dawn.
You know, when our country had serious intellectual capabilities and serious thinkers, a comeback would be predictable. Not going to happen now.
The things that made us great, individualism, innovation, self reliance, freedom, free markets, and responsibility, have been taken away by the state and are no longer valued by the people who make up the majority of our population. We are largely hollowed out shells of what we were. 100 years of progressive influence has made it permanent.
Entropy, you can see it in the limited intellectual capacity of the press. Morons who write propaganda for morons.
It’s gotten so pathetic that I wonder how people function. Thinking is so compartmentalized that breaking out of the box is impossible…especially given the propaganda passing as news. I don’t think that it’s always a case of being ‘morons’, more of a case of acceptance of the ‘normalization’ stage of the subversion. Alot of good intentioned people just can’t accept the fact they are being duped. And when they do the Malthusians will have their way with them.
Gotta change that spelling — that’s “press corpse”, these days. Just ask the Big O!
Q.: Wouldn’t it be quicker, easier, more cost-effective, not to mention “safer”, to skip the meetings altogether and just regurgitate the info from the WH website? Does anybody actually still believe they’re getting more and better info from Carney? LOL
We are ALL OVER Winter Storm Nemo here on CC…
http://commoncts.blogspot.com/2013/02/winter-storm-nemo-updates.html
Just for a balanced/historical view; the press has always chosen sides. ALWAYS.
All the way back to the 16th century in this country, it is nothing new. The fact that this Karl Marx nonsense has been in vogue for over a century is troubling.
I agree that most of the press core (check that) MEDIA as a whole arignorantnt of the ideology, or the whack-a-doodle man himself.
Some years ago I read “A Nation Of Sheep” ….it’s still appropriate in this new media thing…..
Cf:
“A Nation of Sheep – William J. Lederer – Google Books
books.google.com › … › Social Science › Politics & Government
Rating: 3 – 5 reviews
Go to Google Books Home … Though this book is slightly outdated the message is still the same. We are a nation in decline because … Title, A Nation of Sheep …”
We all know that the media is the enemy but I still would like to emphasize how calculated the damage being done to our country is. In any other profession if one does their job poorly the impact is small and localized. A surgeon f**ks up and his patient suffers. And probably his family. But I don’t. And you don’t. And 300 million other Americans don’t. Same with a lawyer f**king up or an electrician or whatever. But when the press commits malpractice it affects all of us. Entire nations are affected when the facts are twisted and mis-represented or just plain omitted.
These traitors in the media are openly and blatantly flaunting their malpractice right in our faces. And we do nothing about it. What the hell can we do about it? The only thing I can think of would get me banned.
That these jobs are considered “plum jobs” tells you a whole lot about the kind of jackass that thinks that way. At any given time I suppose there might be five or six of these “favored” so-called journalists who are moral and ethical men or women, but I doubt it. A person’s desire to work in Washington, D.C. is near certification that his or her value system is flawed.
Its the same everywhere else- every journalist group has its castes. Australia has its Press Club- a bunch of journalists too useless to work anything but be an extended arm of the Australian government media relations. Japan’s journalists are notorious for being insiders who within the Japan mindless culture and foreign journalists are not just excluded but physically forced out the door if they see anything “interesting”.
Senator Paul to Give Tea Party Response to Obama’s State of the Union…After Rubio Katie Pavlich News Editor, Townhall
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2013/02/08/line-drawn-senator-paul-to-give-tea-party-response-to-obamas-state-of-the-union-n1508446
I have some great insights on this issue but I’ll have to present them later. One of my neighbors’ dogs just left a journalist on my front lawn and I’ve got to go clean it up before one of the kids steps in it.