White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

  • Home
  • King’s Commentaries
  • Random Features
  • Photos
  • Public Speaker
  • WHC Episodes
  • About WHC
  • Carrying Stations
  • ME/CFS Alert
  • Contact Us

When Less Was More in the News Business

June 23, 2014 by White House Chronicle Leave a Comment

When I first worked at the newspaper trade in Washington, back in 1966, it was a different journalism. I don’t mean the difference in the technology, the 24-hour news cycle, or the ramped up interest in celebrity. I mean something more protean, more organic.

I worked at The Washington Daily News — a tabloid in size but not in mission — and we covered the news in a very traditional way: whatever our news judgment demanded. Although we were a Washington afternoon newspaper, politics was just part of the mix.

The Daily News had one full-time congressional correspondent, and we sent reporters to Capitol Hill when there was really a lot going on. The Washington Post — then as now the dominant paper in town — covered The Hill more intensely, but not with the intensity that it does today.

In short, political coverage was more laid back; not asleep, but not as frantic as it is now. Nobody felt it necessary to record every slip of the tongue, or where a congressman had lunch or, for that matter, with whom. Certainly, nobody felt they should shun the wine list — and few did.

Covering the White House was a simple matter: once through the gate, you could stroll through the West Wing and talk to people. Today, even if you have a regular or so-called hard pass, you are restricted to walking down the driveway to the press briefing room. If you have an appointment, or want to smell the flowers, you have to have an escort – usually a young person from the press office.

Why this is, and what the purpose of this minder is, nobody has been able to tell me. It is so dispiriting to see the equanimity with which reporters accept their prisoner status.

It did not happen overnight, but gradually under president after president. In my time in Washington, reporter freedom has been curtailed at the White House to the point that unless you want to go to the briefing, there is no point in going through the gate. No news is available because you, the reporter, are not at liberty to collect it.

News out of the White House now has to be gained off the premises, on the phone or by the Internet. The briefing room is a dead zone for print reporters, with the television reporters going back and forth with the press secretary, which is what their medium demands. No news is broken except when the president saunters in and things pick up. That is not worth hanging around there day after day.

But the real change is the proliferation of political media, including the dedicated publications like Roll Call, The Hill, Politico, The National Journal and the cable news networks. This means there are more reporters chasing snippets of news. The big issues get lost as often as not while the news hounds are baying after trivia, little non-events, misstatements, or failure to apologize for imagined sleights.

Also, White House staffers and people who work on Capitol Hill have less and less confidence in reporters and are less frank with them. I find very little point in interviewing Congress people these days because they worry that whatever they say will, if you like, go into their record to be dredged up way in the future.

The other great organic change is in reportorial ambition. Back in the 1960s (and I must confess I started reporting in the 1950s), reporters longed to be foreign correspondents; to go abroad and tell us about life in faraway places. Today, with the emphasis on politics, the ambitious reporter longs to cover politics in Washington. So if there is a big international event, such as the Iraq-ISIS conflict, it ends up being covered through politics. What did Obama say about it? Has John McCain been heard from?

This affects both our understanding of an issue, and does nothing to ameliorate propaganda narratives. Over-covering the snippets does not help: it obscures when it should clarify.

A lot of news used to come out of reporters' long lunches with politicians. Now the number of drinks served, as espied from another table, would be the news. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

Email, RSS Follow
Email

Filed Under: King's Commentaries Tagged With: Capitol Hill, news business, newspapers, Politico, Roll Call, The Hill, The National Journal, The Washington Daily News, The Washington Post

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

White House Chronicle on Social

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Vimeo
  • YouTube
The Day We Abandon Our Nationality for an Irish One

The Day We Abandon Our Nationality for an Irish One

Llewellyn King

Where I live things are beginning to turn green with a hint of spring. But it isn’t just the flora here that has an intimation of green. The whole country, indeed, the whole world, is greening for St. Patrick’s Day. The most extraordinary thing happens on that day: People around the world shed their ethnic […]

How Will We Dress Post-COVID Now That Comfort Is In?

How Will We Dress Post-COVID Now That Comfort Is In?

Llewellyn King

There is a lot of chat about the future of work: Will we do it at home, or will we revert to commuting to the old traditional workplace? But there is an additional, different question: What will we wear? Go to the mirror and look at yourself. Except for the odd Zoom meeting you might […]

Texas Today, Who and Where Tomorrow? Action Needed

Texas Today, Who and Where Tomorrow? Action Needed

Llewellyn King

The horror of the Texas electricity catastrophe should chill the whole country. Nothing strikes at the survivability of a modern society more than the failure of its power supply, maybe nothing at all. When the power supply fails, the failure of human life is not far behind. Yet, at a time when we should expect […]

Edison’s Birthday Is a Busy Time for His Follow-on Inventors

Edison’s Birthday Is a Busy Time for His Follow-on Inventors

Llewellyn King

The electric utility industry looks a bit like a man on a ladder with one foot seeking the rung below, unsure of where it is. But find it he must. The industry is beset with technological change as well as social and political pressures. It isn’t in crisis, but it is in dramatic transition. It […]

Copyright © 2021 · White House Chronicle Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in