White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

War on Media: Now Trump Wants Our Credentials

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Oh, dear! President Trump has hinted that journalists should lose their credentials. He probably means the passes which allow journalists to enter the White House complex at the Northwest Gate and to walk to the briefing room a few hundred yards away.

Over the decades, successive administrations — in my accounting, starting with Jimmy Carter — have reduced the amount of freedom journalists enjoy inside the White House fence. It has been whittled away to the token that it is today. Jousting with the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, is not freedom to gather the news.

A reporter used to be able to walk around the complex without an escort and meet with White House staff in the Old Executive Office Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) without an escort.

More important, when you had an appointment in the West Wing, the nerve center of any administration, once you were through the door, you were at liberty to sit in the corridor before or after your appointment and often someone would invite you in for an unscheduled chat. At least, that was my experience and it was invaluable. You and they learned things. It was a two-way flow.

Incidentally, you did not need one of the prized “hard passes” to do that. Even now, in a time of restriction, a journalist does not need a hard pass to cover a briefing. You can get cleared through the gate by that part of the White House communications operation known as the Lower Press Office. You need pretty good identification like a congressional press pass, which are issued by standing committees of journalists covering Congress; sometimes just a passport or driver’s license.

Trump’s tweet about credentials suggests he believes all reporters need these to do their jobs. Fact is credentials are useful but not essential. Indeed, I question the emphasis on credentials in Washington because they hint at the licensing of journalists, devoutly to be avoided and contested — a constitutional violation under the First Amendment.

Credentials are a game subject to abuse: the very abuse Trump hints at.

It has even been suggested, by the George W. Bush and other administrations, that the press should be kicked out of the White House and given a briefing room in a nearby government building. One of the major values of being inside the White House fence is to garner interviews in the driveway with important visitors — to be able to file on the spot with authenticity and to be a constant, if thorny, reminder to the White House, any White House, that the eyes and ears of the world are feet away.

The damage that Trump has done to the media and by extension to this liberal democracy, is the ceaseless denigration. In 2017, 46 journalists were killed around the world – 26 so far this year — for just doing their jobs. Death in the line of duty is not “fake.”

What is the reporting job? It was best encapsulated by my friend Dan Raviv when he was with CBS News Radio. He said, “I try to find out what is going on and tell people.”

Quite so.

Trump makes that simple idea of finding out what is going on and telling people more difficult and sometimes dangerous. Trump’s daily assault on the media has encouraged all of those with something to hide: those who are cheating, lying, torturing, killing and suppressing the freedom of others. He is damaging the body politic here and in other countries.

Journalism maybe a feeble light but it is a light. For many it is last hope for justice, the ultimate appellate court and the hope that they will be heard.

Trump’s relentless undermining comes at the worst of times for the journalism we have known. Newspapers are gasping, television is losing advertisers and viewers. If all this were not sobering enough, many are demanding that the great new forces for disseminating journalistic output, Google and Facebook, should practice censorship. Shame.

Finding out what’s going on and telling people is hard enough without Trump’s dangerous disparagement — and politically correct censorship.

 

Photo: White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders takes questions from reporters at the White House, Friday, October 27, 2017. Editorial credit: Michael Candelori / Shutterstock.com

Covering the White House, From Twilight to Dark

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Freedom of the press, in my view, has two parts. First there is the freedom to publish, to criticize and to petition. Then there is the critical issue of the freedom to gather the news — not just to report it but also to gather it.

Without the freedom to gather the news, the freedom to print it, broadcast it or comment on it becomes pyrrhic. The official line predominates.

Right now, the freedom to report the news at the White House is under attack and the public’s right know is being impinged. What you get: all the news that can be leaked.

Covering the news at the White House has gotten progressively harder since the days of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, the first administrations I covered.

The Trump administration has attacked the press, ridiculed it and is starving it of critical access. Now there is talk of doing away with the daily press briefing, honored and needed. It is where the government is asked what it is doing and ideally tells the people. It is America’s answer to the much admired “Question Time” in Britain’s House of Commons.

It has never been easy to cover the White House, and history is littered with the ways in which presidents sought to affect the way in which they were covered. Jack Kennedy, a darling to some reporters, so hated the coverage he was getting from The New York Herald Tribune that for a while he forbade it in the White House.

Lyndon Johnson worked over the press corps the way he worked over members of Congress: punishment and reward.

At The Washington Daily News, Wauhillau La Hay worried aloud — often in my presence — that the file from the Scripps-Howard Washington bureau (it was an afternoon newspaper owned by Scripps-Howard) would make it hard for her to cover the social side of the White House, her assignment.

Richard Nixon believed that the press was out to get him and his famous enemies list was real. Yet he ran a surprisingly open White House, as had Johnson.

Compared to what was to follow, it was wide open. Once a reporter got through the gate you were a free agent to roam much of the grounds and to visit the West Wing, if you had someone to see. More important, you got one-on-one interviews with principles without some minder from the press office sitting in and acting as a double agent, reporting back on both the journalist and the interviewee.

After your interview, you were sometimes invited into the office of another staffer. As often as not, they wanted to know what you knew as much as you wanted to know what they knew, even during Watergate.

The best information is the information you get face-to-face, one-on-one. That has become very difficult as time has rolled on. Personally, I found the George H.W. Bush open enough. I remember going over to see his chief of staff, John Sununu, without problem. I phoned him, got a time and went over. No press office involvement. Once, he asked me if I would like to write a speech for the president. I averred.

Excessive leaking is a symptom, a cry from within the belly of the beast that all is not well. At this point the leakers are patriots, not criminals.

In recent administrations, the only way for White House reporters to get into conversations with White House staffers has been to travel with the president overseas: a very expensive stab in the dark. A European trip can cost more than $20,000, and few news outlets can afford the gamble. Even if you are in the pool and sitting on Air Force One, nothing is guaranteed.

If, as has been suggested, the daily briefings stop, more leaks are inevitable. If you cannot seek the information directly, you have to try to get it otherwise. If the front door is closed, a ladder up to the window is the next step. At the same time, relationships become more devious. Like an illicit love affair, no public acknowledgment in public places.

If the right to gather the news is abridged, the whole concept of a free press is diminished. The diminishment is underway.

Government in the dark is the government of authoritarians; not the kind of government one expects from a nation that prohibits the “abridging” of the press in its Constitution. Shame.

 

For InsideSources

Photo: Richard M. Nixon press conference. General Services Administration. National Archives and Records Service. Office of Presidential Libraries. Office of Presidential Papers. (01/20/1969 – ca. 12/1974); President (1969-1974 : Nixon). White House Photo Office. (1969 – 1974)

Requiem for Reporting

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The newspaper of the Newspaper Guild tells the terrible truth: traditional newspaper journalism is dying faster than anyone thought. Almost every major newspaper is making drastic cuts in staffing, from The Washington Post to The Chicago Sun-Times, from The St. Louis Post-Dispatch to The Philadelphia Inquirer, and from The Dallas Morning News to The Modesto Bee. Forty percent of the Newark Star-Ledger’s newsroom staff will depart in a buyout wave. Jim Wilse, editor of The Star-Ledger, said 151 buyout offers were accepted in a newsroom of about 330 people.

Here in Washington, the all-important bureaus which make up most of the Washington press corps are being decimated; and I mean that in the current usage of cut by 90 percent, not the original usage of cut by 10 percent. Colleagues and friends abound who are writing books, trying public relations or seeking government jobs.

The cause of the hollowing out of newspapers is well known: the Internet is getting the information out faster, it is mostly free and the reader can access it selectively. The trouble is that the information on the Web is, if it is any good, first appeared in a newspaper somewhere.

Newspapers still keep the record, but they are woefully behind the times. Today’s newspaper makes no concessions to the passage of time. It is produced in a factory in the middle of the night, transported through the traffic, and entrusted to a child for delivery.

 

Worse, the business model is hopelessly outmoded. It relies on a healthy stream of advertising revenue to make up for the poor income from actual sales of the product.

 

The story is the same in all advanced countries. Newspapers are in trouble, serious, mortal trouble. Only in emerging markets are newspaper sales growing, and that often reflects poor penetration of personal computers and government control of broadcasting.

 

Newspapers have suffered electronic competition in the past and survived. They were portable and kept a tangible record of events. You cannot hook up a printer to a radio or a television set, but you can to a computer. Advertisers can even distribute coupons via the Web.

 

H.L. Mencken, America’s greatest journalist, feared for the morning newspapers in his day because all the circulation and wealth was in the evening papers. Television put paid to that.

 

In Washington, until the 1960s, the dominant paper was The Evening Star. After its purchase and merger with The Times Herald (a weak morning paper owned out of Chicago) in 1954, The Washington Post became the most important political newspaper in the country and a cash generator for its owners. The 40-year golden age of the morning newspaper was dawning. Now it is fading.

 

The mighty New York Times lost money in one quarter this year and may repeat the sorry event. The Washington Post is being subsidized by a test-cramming company, Kaplan, Inc. Two once-proud titles, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times, are at the mercy of a man who, in newspaper terms, is a Philistine—loud-mouthed, vulgar and insensitive to the journalistic craft.

 

There are those who would take pleasure in the agony, and what might be the death throes, of the mainstream media, but they would be ill advised. With the death of newspapers goes the health of the Republic. Democracy only works with a vigorous, disrespectful press, demanding and providing transparency in every aspect of life. The press may be disreputable and eccentric, but it is the indispensable partner of the ballot box.

 

Freedom of the press is the freedom to comment and to criticize. But more important, it is the freedom to investigate. Without investigation, government, corporations and even science goes about its business in the corrupting dark.

 

Already, reflecting the collapse of the Washington reporter corps, there has been a falloff in the number of Freedom of Information Act requests. There are fewer newspapers which can afford to have correspondents travel with the president. Newspapers are not detaching reporters for investigative work of the kind undertaken by The Washington Post on the Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Foreign bureaus, in critical places like Baghdad and Kabul, are not being staffed, let alone Moscow, Beijing and Tokyo.

 

No entity in the blogosphere has the resources to take up the newspaper role.

Opinion is cheap. Reporting costs money–a lot of money. The unintended consequence of this collapse is that the Associated Press will become more important politically and socially than is good for any organization in the news business. The shafts of light will be fewer in the long winter for news ahead.