National Press Club

How Trump and Technology Have Turned the Press Corps From Lions to Hyenas

April 25, 2025 by Llewellyn King Leave a Comment

Political messaging isn’t what it used to be. Far from it. It used to be that the front pages of The Washington Post and The New York Times were an agenda for action. This power was feared and used by successive presidents in my time, from Lyndon Johnson to Joe Biden, but not by Donald Trump.

Before Trump, there were several ways a president spoke to the nation. He either made a speech, held a press conference or leaked an idea to one of the two newspapers that counted in the Washington firmament, The Times and The Post. If that balloon floated upward, something formal followed.

Until Bill Clinton, that was often a speech at the National Press Club, a few blocks from the White House. Clinton never gave a major speech at the Press Club. That was the end of an era, the end of the Press Club as the forum of choice for presidents and heads of state.

In Clinton’s case, this wasn’t a failing of the Press Club system; it was just that it had become cumbersome and unnecessary. Clinton said it was simpler for him to talk to the nation from the White House formally in a press conference in the East Room. Less formally, he could walk into the Brady Briefing Room, where the press was on duty all day and the network cameras were ready to roll.

Technology was changing the way news came out of the White House. While Clinton preferred press conferences or informal presentations, the two dominant newspapers were essential tools to him, as they had been and would be to other presidents until technology again changed things.

I watched the system of trial-by-leak from the Johnson through the Biden years, although things were somewhat different under Bush. There was a new newspaper in town, The Washington Times, which was avowedly conservative, which caused George W. Bush’s staff to lean that way.

However, the new paper didn’t change the system in which a top White House correspondent would be leaked a story. If it failed, it wasn’t heard about again; it would either die in the aridity of silence, or it could be mildly denied as “speculation.”

None of this was ever laid out formally, but it worked and worked for a long time. It gave the president cover and the reporter a payoff with “access.”

With Trump, things are different, primarily because of his seemingly narcotic addiction to publicity but also because technology has bypassed the media of old: the newspapers and the hungry cameras.

Trump has Truth Social, and his aides have X. He makes announcements all the time, changes direction, denies former positions and doesn’t test ideas before sharing them. It is dangerous and giddy, but clearly, it delights Trump.

It has created the kind of yo-yo of yes-no-yes-perhaps that we have seen most recently with Trump’s statements about whether he would or wouldn’t try to fire the chairman of the Federal Reserve, Jerome Powell.

The now-nightly Niagara Falls of unformed presidential thinking on Truth Social has changed the role of the press corps.

From leading the day’s news to following it, the press corps has seen its role change and its significance diminished. The media giants are now forced to follow like hyenas, not hunt like lions. They are following the hunt, not heading it.

Whereas when ideas were tested through media, presidents could be saved from some of their worst inclinations, now there is no restraint, not even the thin membrane provided by a diligent press secretary, suggesting caution or at least preceding thought.

From his early days in real estate in New York, Trump has craved publicity, grooved on it, and seen it as an end in itself more than a means to an end.

In a naive moment when the National Press Building was in financial trouble, which was at one time owned mainly by the Press Club, I suggested to some colleagues that we sell the building to Trump — not Trump the politician but pre-political Trump.

Fortunately, some of my colleagues had dealt with Trump and knew about his media bullying — he would even call into New York radio talk shows and talk about himself as though he was someone else — and warned that our lives would be hell and the club would be used by Trump, if he could, to glorify himself.

Now, we see Trump converting the Oval Office, heretofore an inner sanctum, into a kind of television studio, himself enthroned at the center.

My Newspaper Days (Television, too)

November 29, 2024 by Llewellyn King 3 Comments

On Dec. 13, I will receive an award and give a dinner talk at the National Press Club in Washington, recognizing my 68 years as a journalist and my 58 years as a member of the club.

This recognition is from a club subsection, known as the Owls. Silver Owls are those who have roosted at the club for 25 years or longer; Golden Owls, 50 years or more; and Platinum Owls, 60 years or longer.

You may think the hot type days in newspapers are long past, along with black-and-white television. They may be, but the denizens of that time live on — or some of us do.

We will crowd the storied National Press Club ballroom to raise a glass to the time when headlines had to fit to an exact letter count, when wire services moved the news over teleprinters at 64 words a minute: It could be the biggest story in the world, but it would be moved slower than the speed of reading.

The trick was to break the news into very short takes and move it on several printers. The principal teleprinter of the news services, UPI, AP and Reuters, was equipped with a “bulletin” bell which rang when the biggest news, like an assassination, broke.

In the composing room, where “metal” (you dared not call it lead, even though it was predominantly lead with some tin and antimony) was cast into type and into “furniture,” the rules and the spacing bars that went between the lines of type, craftsmanship ruled.

At one side of that great hive were the Linotype machines, operated by skilled people who could change fonts and type sizes by levering up or down the brass boxes that contained the dies of the type. They were the kings and queens of that art, secure and unflappable. Each Linotype machine contained a thousand parts, according to the Museum of Printing in Haverhill, Massachusetts.

In a rush the printers (note to laymen: printers set and handled the type), the people who ran the presses were pressmen, could assemble a whole page in minutes. If news had broken or, heaven forfend, a page had been “pied” (dropped, type all over the floor) then everything had to be reset and assembled.

Television — when I first worked in it in London, in the days of black-and-white — had its own foibles and culture, and the love of a glass of something.

The equivalent of the printers were the film editors, craftsmen and women all. One of the most skilled, who had had a long career in movies, would entertain us at the in-house bar in the BBC news studios in North London, by swinging a full pint mug of beer over his head without spilling any.

With the same dedication, he would slice and link the celluloid on deadline. He was the man who would save the day, especially if film came in late. Tape was in its infancy.

In the newsrooms on newspapers, tactically just one floor above the composing room, there were the journalists — that irregular army of misfits and egotists who made up a subculture unique to themselves. In Britain, they were referred to somewhere as “the shabby people who smell of drink.” That was true of journalists all over the world in those days. I can attest, bear witness. I was there.

Among the journalists, writers, editors, cartoonists, columnists, photographers, designers, secretaries and librarians were a cast of characters that was almost always the same in every newsroom, print or television. There was the Beau Brummell, the lover, the agony aunt, the gossip, the budding author, and the drunk (who wrote better than anyone else and was tolerated because of that). Then sadly, the gambler.

It seemed to me the drinkers had camaraderie and laughter, the gamblers just losses.

That began to change about 1970, when I was at The Washington Post. There were still drinkers who did the deed at the New York Lounge, a hole in the wall next to the more famous but less used by us Post Pub. But the drinking was definitely down. Among the younger members of the staff, pot was the recreational drug. The older ones still favored a drink.

In London, the big newspapers and the BBC maintained bars in their offices. It made it easy to find people when they were needed.

At the venerable New York Herald Tribune after the first edition closed at 7:30 p.m., the entire editorial staff, it seemed, went downstairs and around the block to the Artist (cq) and Writers, also called Bleaks. It wasn’t known for the quality of its carbonated water, unless that was mixed with something brown.

At the Baltimore News-American, there was a secret route through the mechanical departments, enabling thirsty scribblers to reach the nearest bar undetected.

At the Washington Daily News, which belonged to the Scripps Howard chain of newspapers, the editor was known to favor the nearest bar, an Irish establishment called Matt Kane’s.

At the National Press Club celebration, we will raise one to the days of wine and roses, great stories and wordsmithing, and the fabulous adventure of it — the bad food, terrible hours, poor pay, long stakeouts, days far from home, and always, as my late first wife and great journalist, Doreen King, said, “the inner core of panic” about getting things right. We do care, more than our readers and viewers know.

There is, for all of its tribulations, no greater, more exciting place to be than in a newsroom as big news is breaking.

You are there, inside history.

The People Who Give Us Gifts All Year — the Overcomers

December 23, 2016 by Llewellyn King 1 Comment

Certain gifts are given to us year in and year out. They are the gifts that keep on giving and they come, to my mind, from people I call “The Overcomers.”

This Christmas week A.A. Gill, one of Britain’s most extraordinary newspaper columnists, died at the age of 62. Gill was nominally a food critic. He used that position as a launchpad for some of the most entertaining and acerbic writing anywhere.

His column in Britain’s The Sunday Times was a weekly joy. But Gill didn’t get there easily. First, he nearly died of alcoholism at the age of 30. He wrote a book about it.

Gill straightened out his drinking, but he never straightened out his awful spelling and severe dyslexia. He overcame them largely by phoning in his columns.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the greatest literary talents to come out of South America, struggled with terrible spelling that he detailed in his extraordinary autobiography, “Living to Tell the Tale.” But it didn’t stop him from authoring masterpieces like “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and “Love in the Time of Cholera.”

Willard Scott, who had a successful career in radio in the Washington market before making it as a personality and weatherman on NBC’s “Today” show, suffered acute stage fright. He testified before Congress so that his experience would help others.

But in my random selection of overcomers, the biggest is Laura Hillenbrand, the author of two nonfiction bestsellers, “Seabiscuit: An American Legend” and “Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption.” Both were massive works of research and narrative writing.

The back story, though, is one of suffering, terrible unrelenting suffering. Hillenbrand is afflicted with Myalgic Encephalomyelitis (ME), also known as Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

This is a disease that knows no mercy; a life-sentence disease without a cure and no proven therapy. It punishes sufferers for any effort, even mild exercise, condemning them to bed, often for days. The symptoms are extreme fatigue, migraine headache, aching joints, hyper-sensitivity to light and sound, and dysphasia. Some patients are bedridden for years.

Hillenbrand missed her own wedding because she was unable to walk downstairs or to look down. Yet, this overcomer researched and wrote two extraordinary books. Just as important, in a seminal July 7, 2003, essay in The New Yorker, she told her own story, comforting fellow sufferers and prompting the medical world to take ME more seriously.

My favorite overcomer was a waiter at the National Press Club in Washington, known simply as Mr. Blue. He was a man of such innate dignity that everyone called him “Mister,” and no one seemed to know his first name.

Mr. Blue had had a hard life as an African- American with no education. In fact, he was illiterate, and I was one of the few to find out.

At the club in the 1970s, when I knew Blue, the waiters carried loose, paper checks on which members wrote their orders and club numbers. Blue survived by feats of memory, remembering who had written out which check by keeping them in order. One day, his system failed: He dropped his checks. Mr. Blue was distraught to tears.

Shame is a powerful censor and, like most censorship, it neither helps the sufferer, nor does it do anything for the body politic. No one wants to be famous for their inadequacies or their sickness. But going public comforts and is a gift. It is the gift, so important in the holidays, of saying: You are not alone.

In that spirit, I have to go public with this: I am, for a broadcaster, a bad sight-reader. I have mild dyslexia, and I’ve been humiliated by my terrible spelling all of my long life in journalism. Happy holidays!

There’s No Gold in Them Thar Years

March 22, 2010 by Llewellyn King 4 Comments

You don’t grow old gradually. It’s a sudden thing.

You probably haven’t even realized you’re in late middle age. Then, without warning, you’ve crossed the age meridian irrevocably.

You’re old.

It’s a sobering business. Chances are you won’t forget where you were when old age arrived, like the day President Kennedy was assassinated.

I was at the Amtrak ticket counter at Baltimore-Washington International Airport. The woman ticket seller looked at me and said: You get the senior discount.

Senior discount? Never heard of it before then.

I glanced over my shoulder, thinking the clerk was addressing someone behind me. There was no one there.

I was the subject of her compassion. Damn!

It’s not so much about being old, it’s about privacy. Everyone knows from your face you’re old and treats you with toxic kindness: Would you like to sit? Why don’t you take the elevator? We won’t be late.

But the really awful patronage comes from doctors.

In particular, doctors who tell you what they think you’ll like to hear. Try these cheering words from the mavens of Medicare: Your knees aren’t bad for your age. You have an enlarged prostate, but that’s normal for a man of your age.

Man of your age. That’s hate speech in the ears of older patients.

Worse. It’s medical relativism. It makes you feel like you’re akin to the vehicles at Rent-A-Wreck: You’ll get down the road, but not out of state. Like most men, and the same goes for women, you’re clapped out, past your sell-by date, out of the prospect of medical miracles. Unlike the way Dylan Thomas dispatched his old dad, you’re going to go gentle into that good night.

One of Americas more interesting captains of industry is John Rowe. He’s chairman of Exelon, the giant utility company. When asked at the National Press Club which companies Exelon was lusting to acquire, Rowe responded as though the question was about something human: I’m 64, and lust is a big problem.

It was a crafty double entendre. Young reporters thought he was talking acquisitions, but the men of the age of hot type knew differently.

When you’re in the Medicare generation, you’re by definition in lust deficit. You can lust, but you’ll most likely lust alone.

For example, the old luster meets a young lustee at a party. The charm flows, the wine provokes, and then the awful remark that deflates: You’ve had such an interesting life. Words like that inter hope. They put you in your place with your prosthesis, dental implants and all those pills, which suddenly you need, or you’re told you need.

There are some delightful goodies in store for oldies. You pay half price on public transport in many places, younger people usually offer you their seats on trains and buses, doctors charge Medicare and not you for care, and the government sends you checks. You can jump the line at airports on geriatric grounds, and you can doze off anywhere when things get boring. You can wear a brown belt with black shoes, and you can question prices without shame: Does the soup come with the entree? Eccentricity gets new license.

Then there’s the capriciousness of memory. A friend in Hong Kong sent me a long e-mail about people we went to middle school with. I wrote back, congratulating him on his memory. He fired back: Thanks, but I wish I remembered where I parked my car? I haven’t seen it for two days.

Should he be allowed to drive? Have the authorities taken his car?

I, you understand, am a particularly boyish 70. –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate