From easy chats to attempts at control to open hostility

COMMENTARY | August 221, 2006

Saul Friedman takes a look at how some presidents have dealt with the press corps. The relationship, he says, ain’t what it used to be.

By Saul Friedman
saulfriedman@comcast.net

Time was when reporters covering the White House hung around in the West Wing lobby, close enough to see who came to see the president, and grab him (or her) for a couple of questions. I was reading the teletype on one of my first visits to the White House when I felt a presence over my shoulder. It was President Johnson, always restless, who’d come out of his office to read the wires and chat.

But presidents since Richard Nixon have been trying to control reporters in the White House press room, which he built over the Roosevelt’s old swimming pool. (Ron Ziegler regularly sent one of his assistants to cruise the press area to find out what reporters were talking and writing about.)

Ronald Reagan used one of his long August vacations to remodel the briefing room, like a small auditorium with assigned, and labeled seats, depending on status, with the networks up front. Hillary Clinton tried to ban reporters from venturing out of the press area. And now, if the Bush administration allows the press to come back after another remodeling, chances are it will be especially accommodating for television. For since Bill Clinton’s man, Mike McCurry, opened the briefings to live television, the press room has truly become a stage to strut and fret upon the news.

And that reminds me of the day in 1989 I decided to leave the prestigious White House assignment after ten years, to cover the State Department and foreign affairs. And others followed. Looking back,  it’s one reason why White House reporters are  taking so much heat as “lapdogs, “stenographers,” “benign,” and worse. They can’t help what has happened to the White House beat.

On Tuesday, October 17 of that year, the San Francisco-Oakland area was wrecked by a 7.1 earthquake, a big story, to be sure. President George H.W. Bush wisely decided not to rush to the scene; Vice-President Dan Quayle had gone and his visit was denounced as a publicity stunt.     

Nevertheless, the president was under pressure from media advisers and television producers to show his face. On October 20, the White House had scheduled a morning appearance by the chairman of Council of Economic Advisors, to boast of another month of economic growth. And a few of us print reporters were lying in wait to grill him on why, in view of this good news, so many more Americans were living in poverty. A fair story. But we didn’t get a chance to ask.

Word leaked to the television reporters that the president would fly that day to Oakland and back. And amid the frenzy of the TV reporters and crews demanding the logistical details and talking to producers and their desks, Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater ushered the bemused economist off the stage and briefed on the trip. That consisted of a long flight to the coast and a long wait in a blimp hangar at Moffet Naval Air Station while Bush, a pool, the network correspondents and the at least a dozen cameras and security people and weary rescue workers tromped through the ruins. On the late night flight back to DC aboard the press plane, one of Fitzwater’s assistants told me, “It wasn’t much of a story, but it made good pictures.”

Let me digress here: Some months earlier during the last days of the Reagan administration, the president made a surprise appearance in the briefing room. I don’t recall the subject, but almost immediately a shouting match broke out among the three network television reporters, each of whom wanted to get on the air asking a question. The president was never very good at choosing among shouting reporters, but the television types were literally screaming and Reagan left. The TV reporters were still yelling when, as a senior print reporter, I intervened and lectured all of them. One of them, Chris Wallace, then with NBC, said, “Saul, we’re all in the same business.” I think I replied, “No, you’re in the entertainment business.”

I’m not about to make judgments about the relative worth of television and print journalism, but these stories, and events since then, have made it clear that television, the camera and the news as entertainment, have become a higher priority on the White House beat than non-photogenic substance. If the print reporters, especially, the New York Times and the Washington Post once set the day’s agenda, now it’s CNN, Fox, and the networks.

The television reporters covering the White House include veterans, and young, bright reporters—perhaps too young. But they are limited by the story that makes the best pictures. And although they may ask decent questions at a press briefing, the answers, and the issues, often complex, don’t make it to the air because the correspondent doesn’t have time to explain, or the correspondent is restricted to the story and pictures of the day, like “Crisis in the Middle East.”

For the print reporters, who take the back seats in the briefing room, the Bush administration has made their lives and their ability to go beyond the handouts and briefing especially difficult. For this White House has been the most secretive, least accessible in anyone’s memory. Favored columnists and friendly reporters, like Tony Snow before he became press secretary, had special access to White House officials.

But notice that most of the critical, investigative pieces have come from reporters working outside the White House. The Reagan administration, which did a fair job of spinning, and managing the news, provided access to reporters who may have been critical, but fair. Similarly the elder Bush, whom I had known when I was a reporter in Texas, was more in command of the issues than his son, and was comfortable talking with the press.

After Ronald Reagan at the Berlin Wall, the elder Bush’s triumphs – the first Gulf War, Panama, and the peaceful collapse of the Soviet Union – did him little good politically, because for the time being his press-savvy Secretary of State, James A. Baker III, and issues of great substance, including pressure on Israel to support the Middle East peace conference in Madrid, took some of the spotlight away from the White House.

For reasons that aren’t clear, the son has reversed much of what his father stood for, in Iraq, the Middle East, international relations, domestic and economic policy, and in open hostility towards the press, especially critical reporters, who only recently have begun to resist what’s fed them.

                                           

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