White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

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)

Murdoch Is Felled by a Disease He Once Cured

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In the 1960s, even to an old union man like myself, British newspaper
unions had reached a point at which they were a threat not only to the
newspaper industry, but also to the freedom of the press itself.

It took someone as ruthless and sociopathic as the unions to find a way to
break their hold. That man was Rupert Murdoch and he did it with
outstanding courage, cheek and military-like planning.

In theory, the deal was simple: If the unions would not behave in the
workplace, he, the proprietor, would move the workplace.

In today’s world, this sounds easy. But in those days, trade union rights
were regarded as inviolable. A blow against one union was a blow against
all unions. “Solidarity,” in union speak, was awesome.

Yet Murdoch set out to leave London’s Fleet Street; then the physical home
of nearly all of Britain’s national papers, now the metaphorical home of
British journalism.

In secret Murdoch built the most modern printing plant of its day in
Wapping, the old dock area in the East End of London. He surrounded it with
razor wire and prison-like defenses and secretly recruited new workers
from the areas of Britain with the highest unemployment.

Nothing so bold had ever happened in British industrial relations.

To get the operation rolling, Murdoch made demands of the National
Graphical Association — the most militant of the unions — on
computerization. The union did not want journalists touching computers,
and they wanted no changes in the antiquated machinery that they used.

Strikes were frequent and often unofficial: The workers just downed tools
over almost always imagined grievances. Then they started censoring the
newspapers: They would not print newspapers with editorial material they
disapproved of. Production was said to be “lost.” This euphemism meant
that the newspapers never appeared in some markets.

If a newspaper were to run a story about communist penetration of the
unions, which was rife, the printers censored it. Sometimes they allowed a
blank space to appear, and sometimes the paper had to withdraw the
offending-but-accurate report to get printed at all.

With planning worthy of a great general, Murdoch orchestrated the move to
Wapping and sprung it on the country as a fait accompli in late January
1986. The journalists, who belonged to a less belligerent union, the
National Union of Journalists, were divided. Some “went to Wapping,”
others quit.

All of Murdoch’s titles moved, including the weekly News of the World, The
Sun, a daily, and the venerable Times and Sunday Times. Five thousand
old-line workers were sacked for honoring what the unions said was a
provoked strike.

But the press was saved, and Murdoch saved it. All the newspapers made it
to fight another day.

The unions had become arrogant, thuggish and sociopathic. They did not
care about the principles of a free press, the illogic of their Luddism or
the greater harm to society. Power and money was their thing, and they had
power: power to boss the bosses, power to set the number of workers who
worked each night, and increasingly power to determine what was printed.

Lord Rothermere, one of Britain’s newspaper barons, was once asked, “How
many people does it take to produce The Daily Mail?” His lordship replied,
“About one quarter.”

The featherbedding was awesome. Some delivery drivers got paid by three
newspapers for delivering papers when they were, in fact, working
somewhere else altogether.

So there is a fine irony that the Murdoch’s News Corp. now stands accused
of many of the sins of the unions he disciplined: sociopathic arrogance; a
desire to control the news as well as cover it; and a thuggish corruption
that reached into the highest levels of at least three British
administrations, Thatcher, Blair and Cameron; and has brought low the
world’s largest and most storied police force, the Metropolitan Police,
known as Scotland Yard.

Murdoch’s many newspapers in England accumulated so much power that they
began to dictate the news, orchestrate policy and politicians came live in
awe of the power of the News Corp. apparatus to reveal people’s private
lives, delve into their finances, and have their careers boosted or
blunted by columnists and selective reporting.

Many years ago, before Murdoch established himself in Fleet Street, one of
its legendary characters, Harry Procter, wrote an angry memoir called
“Street of Shame.” Yes, indeed. — For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate