White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

The Virtues and Vices of a Press Secretary

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The stature of some press secretaries grows the longer they are away from the podium in the James S. Brady briefing room at the White House. Others fade quickly. Brady himself is known more for his role in fighting for gun control than he is for his time as Ronald Reagan’s spokesman. His tragic wounding and subsequent disability dwarf whatever he said in his press briefings.

Jerry terHorst, who resigned after only a month in the job because his boss, Gerry Ford, lied to him, was a hero to the press for about as long as he had been press secretary. He ended up working for the Ford Motor Company.

Bill Clinton’s second press secretary, Dee Dee Myers, had a rough ride in the job and a modest career in journalism since then.

Among the revered are Marlin Fitzwater, who served George H.W. Bush; Jody Powell, who was Jimmy Carter’s press secretary and has just died of a heart attack; and Mike McCurry of the Clinton administration. George W. Bush burned through two press secretaries before he tapped the beloved Tony Snow and the admired Dana Perino.

Barack Obama’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs, gets mixed reviews. He said that he talked to Powell and others about the job, but he executes it in his own eccentric way. This has some of the White House press corps up in arms and others giving him a passing grade. It is a classic case of where you sit.


The irritation begins with time-keeping. For Gibbs, but not Obama, nothing seems to go on time. The principal press briefing–the one seen on C-SPAN–is scheduled the night before, and reporters are e-mailed this along with the president’s schedule for the next day. Sometimes, this schedule arrives after 8 p.m., making the planning of the next day difficult.

That is only the beginning of the time problem. Invariably, the briefing time slips the next day. Updates delay the beginning of the briefing by one or more hours. But that is not final: Gibbs may make his entrance 20 or more minutes late and without apology.

Then the fault lines within the press corps really open up. They have to do with who gets to ask questions and who is shunned—and this, in turn, has to do with who has assigned seats and sits in the first two rows.

There is ugliness here. Here is class warfare by employment, and here is an unwitting exposure of the White House’s hand.

Clearly, television counts more than print–even dominant print outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. Likewise, it is revealed in Gibbs’ world that the Associated Press trounces Reuters and Bloomberg. The foreign press gets very short schrift.

Gibbs’ clear favorites are the television networks and a new crop of correspondents he got to know on the campaign trail. Correspondents like Chuck Todd of NBC are often engaged in a colloquium to which the three dozen or more other correspondents are just spectators.

If you are not one of the favored, you sit in one of the back rows with your hand in the air for favor of recognition to ask a question. It does not happen often.

There is much less criticism of the substance of Gibbs’ answers than there is with his tardiness and favoritism. Gibbs will contentiously argue a point with a reporter, but he also will refreshingly admit when he does not have the answer. Also he does not indulge in dead-end referrals, such as “I refer you to the CIA,” or “I refer you to the vice president’s office.” George W. Bush’s first two press secretaries, Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan, did this with exasperating frequency. Snow turned away wrath with philosophy and Perino handled heckling press with humor and efficiency.

Unfortunately, Gibbs’ fascination with a small number of TV reporters has carried over to the full-blown press conferences. The chosen few are again the chosen few. The rest of us are right there with the plotted plants: to be seen but not heard.

Favoritism from the White House Podium

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Like others who ply the newspaper trade here in Washington, I have attended many presidential press conferences, and I am always struck by the same thought when the president steps up to the podium: how alone he seems to be.

Because presidents are nearly always surrounded by staff, security and often other politicians, the essential aloneness of the president can be missed. At press conferences, a president is both alone and on his own. No assistant can whisper in his ear or produce a useful statistic. Unlike the British prime minister who sits among members of his cabinet—and has advance notice of the questions–during Question Time, when a president hears a question he must answer it with the full knowledge that his words are circling the globe, and that later he must defend them.

A presidential press conference is intolerant of slips of the tongue, twisted history or evasion. You might say a press conference is an enhanced interrogation technique.

So it is strange, and unfortunate, that President Barack Obama and his media team leave the impression that his press conferences are rigged.

The appearance of “rigging” came in with George W. Bush and, along with some other aspects of the Bush press operation, has survived. I am referring to the practice of preselecting who will be called upon to ask questions. This gives the impression that the either the reporters in question know they are going to be called upon or, worse, that the president has advance knowledge of the questions themselves.

Until Bush, presidential press conferences were free-for-alls with dozens of correspondents shouting, “Mr. President.” Sure it was untidy, but it was fair and transparent. One imagines that the prescreening now takes place between the press secretary, Robert Gibbs, and Obama. Hence the favoring of television networks, The New York Times, and one black and one Hispanic correspondent, as was witnessed last week. This kind of engineering wrings spontaneity out of the proceedings and causes more and more reporters to stay home and watch the travesty on television.

This trend was obvious in the drop-off in attendance from Obama’s first and second prime-time press conferences to his third. If there is no chance that you will get to ask a question, what is the point in attending?

Many White House regulars, some of whom have covered the White House for decades, are expressing dissatisfaction with Gibbs’s fascination with a handful of reporters–most newly arrived on the beat, like Gibbs himself.

It is not reasonable to expect the president to be familiar with inner workings of the White House press corps. But it is upsetting that Gibbs has clearly not sought to learn from Bill Clinton’s last two press secretaries, Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart, both of whom were masterful in difficult circumstance. Or, in the spirit of bipartisanship, he might put in a call to Dana Perino, one of the stars of the waning days of George W. Bush’s presidency and his last press secretary.

One of the questions Gibbs might usefully ask of past press honchos is how they kept things running on time. Seldom were briefings late or rescheduled during the day, the way they are now. Clinton was a terrible timekeeper, but the press operation was sensitive to the time demands on correspondents. Not so Gibbs. When it comes to tardiness, the press operation at the Obama White House is in a class by itself.

Back to last week in the East Room of the White House. As is the way in these days of tribal politics, the Washington commentariat saw what it wanted to see in Obama’s performance. One conservative friend, John Gizzi of Human Events, thought Obama was in campaign mode. Some fit the press conference to their belief that the president is hell-bent on taking the country down the French socialist road, and that he will not rest until the tricolore flies over the White House and American schoolchildren sing the “Marseillaise.” Others, amazingly, found proof that Obama would be only a one-term president.

I think I can speculate with the best of them and I saw only a tired, slightly impatient but impressively articulate man alone with big troubles.

Obama is trying to fix everything at once. The only person who really pulled that off militarily and domestically was Napoleon Bonaparte. It was Napoleon who gave us the idea that a new leader’s effectiveness should be assessed in 100-day increments–except it was 111days for Napoleon, but the Paris newspapers shortened it to 100 days. And the 100-day timeline was not at the beginning of Napoleon’s reign, but at the end–the time between his escape from Elba and his final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo.

 

Showtime in the East Room

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There should be a morning-after pill for journalists. As access to White House insiders has decreased over the decades, journalism has obsessed over the rare lifting of the curtain—particularly press conferences with the president.

This week has been no exception. The Tuesday evening press conference in the East Room, which I attended, has been analyzed, dissected, examined, scrutinized; deconstructed and reconstructed, praised and excoriated. I heard Fox’s Bill O’Reilly call in his body language expert so that his viewers would know not only what Barack Obama said but also what he was thinking when he said it. There’s alchemy in the no-spin zone!

Forget O’Reilly, though. For sheer perspicacity, the prize goes to a commentator on CNN who said that the press conference, held on the 64th day of Obama’s presidency, revealed that he would be a one-term president. This sort of fantasy in the name of analysis deserves a Hall of Fame of its own.

The media does the morning-after thing for good and sufficient reason: Over the years the White House, under both parties, has become more and more impenetrable to reporters. We don’t roam the place as we once did in the days of Johnson and Nixon. In those days, reporters could walk the West Wing freely and could interview staffers without the intrusion of the press office, and the numbing effect of trying to conduct an interview in the presence of a press office minder.

No news will be broken when the minder is there, presumably to keep tabs on both the journalist and the official. Also, as I have often said, the press office presence cuts the White House off from a valuable source of information that is hard for presidential aides to get except from journalists.

In the days when you could get to senior White House players without a minder, interviews would invariably end with, “What have you heard​?” And sometimes,“What do you think?”

Can you imagine any senior official asking those questions in the presence of a de facto double agent from the press office? I can tell you it doesn’t happen and it won’t happen.

As the White House press corps has swelled in numbers, it has lost in access. It is less effective and more completely controlled by the White House press office. With each successive president, the manipulation of the media becomes more pervasive and more obvious.

Take this latest press conference, referred to on the White House address system as “the program.” Twice this happened after the 360-plus journalists and photographers filed into the East Room.

The anonymous voice on the public address system was anything but a press conference in the old sense of the word. It was, indeed, a program. Only 13 reporters were called upon to ask questions. And clearly, the selection of these had nothing to do with their skills as interrogators. Pointedly, no major newspapers were called upon and few reporters, who was not backed by a television network, had any hope of getting the nod. Radio was completely shunned.

How one longed for a real press conference: a forest of hands and a multitude voices crying out, “Mr. President.” That system was ragged but in its way fair. The small radio station could compete with the mighty TV network.

Obama may be an egalitarian at heart but his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, is anything but. He is an elitist with a penchant for a fistful of TV reporters. The rest of us have the morning-after blues–and no medication.

 

Tribulations of a Press Secretary

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Sportsmen spend hours studying tapes of opposing teams or players. Presidential press secretaries, however, tend to prefer learning on the job. It is early, and scant on charity, to attack President Barack Obama’s man Robert Gibbs. But he has had a rocky start.

Gibbs seems to be unsure of his game in the White House press briefing room. The crush of journalists overwhelming the small room during his briefings is not there to lead a cheering session for the president. Nor are they an operatic claque come to embarrass the tenor. They want to find out what is going on and tell their viewers, listeners and readers all about it as fast as their skill and electrons can carry it.

Gibbs must know that the White House press corps takes no prisoners. But in these early days of the Obama administration, he still seems to be in campaign form—even treating reporters as though they are his friends, and by extension sympathetic to the president.

This is an easy mistake to make, and Gibbs is not the first to make it. On the campaign trail, there is a practical necessity for reporters to be cordial, or downright cozy, with the campaign staff.  With the election, any campaign bonhomie evaporates and some remembered slights are exposed.

Gibbs, one hopes, is too smart to believe the right-wing ranters bark that the media is “in the tank” with Obama. In fact, the political press fears plans to continue the arms-length strategy of his presidential campaign in the White House.

Four recent press secretaries set a good example of how to do the job.  They are Marlin Fitzwater, George H.W. Bush’s press secretary; Clinton’s Mike McCurry and Joe Lockhart; and George W. Bush’s Tony Snow and Dana Perino. All did the job with aplomb, defended their employer with skill, and tried hard to answer questions without attacking the questioner.

Poor press secretaries include Clinton’s Dee Dee Myers, and George W. Bush’s Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan. They did not appear to have the access to the president that is vital for the job, and often attacked the questioner by denigrating a question as “hypothetical.” Questioning often requires hypothesis. The press secretary who is not in the president’s confidence and his inner circle will fail with the press. He or she, not knowing the answer, will fall back on the hated evasion: “I refer you to . . .” This does not help someone on deadline.

Gibbs got into this dangerous territory early on. He refused to answer any questions about an unmanned aerial strike on terror suspects inside Pakistan. The question was obvious: Did the president authorize the strike and what were the policy implications going forward? The briefer clearly had not been briefed about something that would come up.

Then there was Gibbs’s problem with lobbyists. Gibbs appeared blindsided when asked why President Obama had signed an order limiting the role of lobbyists day ago and now was nominating Raytheon’s top lobbyist, William Lynn III, to be deputy secretary of defense. Gibbs tried to punt but could not connect with the ball.

No doubt many of Gibbs’s problems had to do with transition difficulties that included an incomplete press list, a total collapse of White House e-mail, and a staff which had never seen the White House press corps after its quarry.

Gibbs is not new to Washington, and has worked on Capitol Hill, but there is no preparation for carrying the message of the president to the world except by learning on the job. The press secretary has to learn that every gesture and gaffe will be dissected globally. Even the variety of his neckties has already drawn attention in, of all places, The Christian Science Monitor.