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Confessions of a Potted Plant at the White House
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Excuse me, but I am a potted plant. Well, at best an extra, who has been sent over by Central Casting to fill in the numbers.
I am not alone. There were at least 350 other potted plants, aka White House reporters, who gathered in the East Room on Tuesday night to watch what the White House itself called “the program.”
The thing was concocted, stage-managed and went off well enough, given that the White House press office had wrung anything like spontaneity out of it. It was indeed as they had billed it: a program in which President Obama took his time to respond at length to some really bland and uninspired questions, posed by largely the same people–from the television networks plus the Associated Press–who are called upon daily in press secretary Robert Gibbs’s briefings.
At those briefings, the rest of us sit there in our potting soil. We wave our arms in the hope we might be recognized towards the end of a long, rambling session that seems more like the press secretary chatting with his pals who have seats assigned in the front.
Keep this up and reporters morph into courtiers, which serves neither the larger purposes of democracy nor the specific strategies of the administration. At some level, it is also very insulting to the large number of reporters who ply the journalism trade in Washington.
Clearly, the White House is defining reporters by where they work rather than what they do. This is an inversion, lacking in understanding of the realities of the media craft.
The truth is that newspapers trump television every time when it comes to original reporting. Their nature and tradition makes it that way. Television– and I have worked in it and contemporaneously with print for many years–is the friend of the instant and the enemy of the profound.
The written word, not the broadcast one, is the beacon of liberty. It is durable, more accountable and requires more coherence than its powerful but fleeting electronic cousin.
It is neither right nor possible for the White House to balance out the competing claims for the right to question the president or the press secretary. The solution lies in the past: In the old days of a forest of hands, the earnest cries to be recognized by eager questioners.
It is messy, but it works. Actually, 350 people shouting “Mr. President” is an affirmation of a free press rather than the pre-selection of an elite with a predictable roster of questions–usually right out of that day’s newspapers.
The old free-for-alls, where the president or the briefer selected from a clamoring throng, was disorderly, noisy and rather glorious in that the world could see how open the media is in the United States. As it is now, it appears scripted even though the questions are composed only by the reporters (I hope).
Sure, the open system looks and sounds like feeding time at the animal shelter. But most of us would rather be seen jumping for attention than sitting around like plotted plants, honored to be allowed in but with nothing to do except fill out the numbers. Heck, you can do that with computer animation.
This administration gives every indication that it is enthralled by new media: Web-only publishing and bloggers. If it is to include their interests, it has to stop its rigid press handling and free things up in the interface between the White House and those who report on it.
The alternative is the kind of quota system that was emerging this week, designed to mollify those who were upset after President Obama’s first press conference: the military press, the Hispanic broadcasters and, in concession to new media, Politico which tries to be both print and Web.
Personally, I do not like shouting questions in crowded “programs.” I am quite relaxed as a potted plant.
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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.
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Fatigue as the Ultimate Healer
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I first encountered the healthy corrective of fatigue when I was a young writer for a television news service in London. I was chronically late. Every interview I did started with an apology. Every day when I showed up for work, I was late. My supervisor would look at me and at the clock and sigh.
One day, I decided that the price of being late was too high: If you have to start with an apology, you never get a decent interview and the long face of my supervisor was painfully reproving. I was tired of my self-imposed misery. I was fatigued with my own sloth. Since that time, I have been fairly punctual.
Fatigue, it seems to me, can be motivator in governance and foreign policy. Take the three great revolutions of our time: accommodation in Northern Ireland, the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the Soviet Union. I submit that in all of these, fatigue played a critical if not seminal role.
I have been in and out of South Africa all of my life. Sure sanctions and international pressure played a role in bringing about change. But there was something else at work: fatigue. The people of South Africa were very tired of their own creation. Driving across South Africa in the 1970s with an African relief driver, I ran into what used to be called “petty apartheid”: segregated places to eat. As a result, we took out food and ate it in the car. But at two roadside eateries (they were few and far between), the owners apologized to me for the offensive law. The weight of the injustice was getting to them.
That was the first time I saw a sufficient glimmer of hope that peaceful change would come, as it did.
In Northern Ireland it appeared that the sectarian violence, which emerged in 1963, would go on forever. Catholics and Protestants were killing each other in barbarous ways and terrorism was spreading into Britain. Over the 15 years I participated in a think tank in Ireland, I heard endless speeches from both sides about the hopelessness of the situation in which the Irish Republican Army, the right-wing Protestant “hard men” and the British Army fought a triangular terrorist war.
On a summer’s morning in 1982, there were two terrorist attacks in the center of London. A car bomb was detonated as 16 members of the Queen’s Household Cavalry trotted along a Hyde Park’s South Carriage Drive; and less than two miles away, in Regent’s Park, a military bandstand was blown up. Toll for the day: 10 soldiers killed, 55 injured. The I.R.A. claimed responsibility for the strikes. All of Britain was on a terrorist footing, but that did not stop an attack on Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Brighton, England two years later.
By the 1990s, you could sense a change in Ireland: People were tired of the killing and living in fear. Without that fatigue, that revolution, the Good Friday agreement of 1998 and power-sharing, would not have happened.
Likewise by the late 1980s, the Soviet Union–the edifice of communism with its incompetence, its privations and its paranoia–had lost the loyalty of the people and the terror apparatus of the state was failing. Russians were tired of it and Poland was in near revolt. Mikhail Gorbachov loosened the reins and things hurtled forward.
Alas fatigue is not a policy, not even a strategy. It is just a reality; a factor in protracted disputes, oppressive governance and pervasive injustice.
When, then, will fatigue set in between combatants in the Middle East, the oppressed of North Korea or the misgoverned of Africa? According to my theory of fatigue, these things are overdue. But it is easier to fix your own timekeeping than history’s.
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The Pickens and Obama Energy Plans: How Smart Are They?
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The billionaire T. Boone Pickens and President Barack Obama have something in common: a plan for saving us from imported energy. In doing so they hope to reduce air pollution, create jobs and head the country towards a more sustainable energy future.
But Pickens and Obama do not have the same plan. In fact, Pickens has been critical of Obama’s plan; and Obama has been silent on Pickens’ plan.
Where both plans converge is on the billions of tax dollars that will be needed to upgrade the now ramshackle transmission system. This is often called the grid. The fact is it is not a grid at all, but a series of local grids that are sometimes interconnected. Texas is not connected to the rest of the U.S. system, for example.
The first problem with the two plans is that they are aimed specifically at foreign oil but deal with electricity, which we import in small quantities from Canada. Electric imports are not a problem. Both have ideas about how a greener, smarter electric grid will help toward cutting the astonishing amount of oil–20 million barrels a day–we consume in the U.S., 70 percent of it from overseas.
The Pickens plan is fairly straightforward. He wants to build wind farms up the spine of the United States, from Texas to Canada–hundreds of thousands of windmills in the best wind belt in the country. This electricity will be transported from the relatively underpopulated Intermountain West to the heavily populated coastal cities of the East and West.
This electricity would be moved on the new smart grid that everyone is sure is desirable, and on the way if the government foots the bill and there is enough use of eminent domain to force the new lines across private property. One of the reasons the grid is not larger and more flexible today is that it often takes as long as 20 years to overcome the local protest and litigation. Even the abusive use of eminent domain does not block lawsuits over issues like the health effects of large power lines.
To Pickens, this electricity will make it possible to back out the 30 percent of natural gas now being used to generate electricity; and that resource will substitute for oil in large trucks and eventually domestic autos, after the new filling stations are built.
Neat, huh? Maybe in 25 years?
Obama’s plan is more ambitious, but less specific. It seeks a huge increase in wind generation; the use of solar panels in cities; and, of course, the building of a really smart grid, which will give consumers the option to turn off their appliances when electricity is expensive and back on when it is cheap, mostly late at night and early in the morning–midnight suppers and 3 a.m. showers. The relief from imported oil comes in the use of electric cars, hybrid cars and possibly the electrification of some rail lines, where high-speed trains are envisaged.
Under the Obama plan and with his grid, your house will be monitored 24 hours a day for energy usage and it will get helpful directions on energy conservation. Ergo if you are growing plants in the basement, you might not want to sign up. Privacy is an issue. Also, will we go smart? Those who cannot program their VCR might want to dodge the smart grid.
There will be winners and losers. The winners will be the equipment manufacturers (lines, poles, meters, wire, insulators, turbines), civil engineers and, of course, lawyers and consultants. The losers? If the scheme collapses under its own grandeur, it will be taxpayers; job-seekers and ultimately the environment, if the utilities keep burning coal for more than half of their production. If the windmills are built under either scheme, birds and bats will get it. Both species are already slaughtered by the tens of thousands by flying into wind turbine blades.
While gasoline is cheap, the lights are on and the thermostat is set either too low or too high, it is going to be hard to tell people they have to change–and pay for it.
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Requiem for the DC News Bureaus
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Journalism in its modern form owes everything to the spread of general education in the 19th century. In the turbulent decade of the 1840s, governments in the advanced countries added education to their responsibilities. In a generation, millions of people could read and were hungry for reading materials like The New York Tribune, founded and edited by Horace Greeley.
By the 1900s, newspapers were a great business. As there were many newspapers in many cities, only a few had great influence–and those were primarily in the regional centers of New York, Chicago and San Francisco. They included Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World, Joseph Medill’s Chicago Tribune and William Randolph Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner. Newspapers were a means to great wealth, power and prestige. Proprietors saw themselves not only as political king-makers but also as arbiters of fashion, taste and public rectitude.
From the birth of the modern newspaper (greatly sped along by the invention of the Linotype machine at the end of the 19thcentury), newspapers have been a good business. With annual profit exceeding 20 percent, newspapers have been among the most desirable businesses in America. In the 1980s and ’90s, they were bought and sold at enormous multiples. The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times looked invincible, eternal.
Then the Internet struck. Sales began to slide and advertising began to relocate to the Web. Publishers realized too late the folly of giving away their content on it. Journalists had favored this because they believed it would mean more readers, and publishers had thought the publicity would benefit them.
Massive adjustment is not new to the newspaper industry. But never has it been so imperative.
The1960s saw the first wave of newspaper closures, particularly in New York where five papers folded. Then, one by one, afternoon newspapers died across the country. Washington and Baltimore both supported two afternoon newspapers, but they began to fail in the 1970s and ’80s.
Once, evening newspapers had been the jewels, bought by men and women who went to work early and wanted something to read before and after dinner. But television was changing the way people got their news.
The workforce was changing too; the service economy was replacing manufacturing. The new workforce read early and watched television late. This lifted morning newspapers into the stratosphere, particularly when they were a monopoly in their home cities. From The Washington Post to The Los Angeles Times, things were rosy. And for small town monopolies, things were rosier–almost a license to print money.
Mass circulation magazines, such as Life, Look and The Saturday Evening Post, all hung it up. In their place, there appeared specialized magazines about wine, running, computers and sex. Publishing regrouped and entered what will be seen as a golden age.
The common thread was that the few, the publishers, served the many, their readers. As A.J. Liebling said, “Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one.” But with blogs, the many are now publishing to the many, commented Andrew Glass of The Politico.
Today, newspapers are an anachronism: perishable products, produced in a factory well before consumption and delivered, as often as not, by 10-year-olds. They are not so different today from the one that Greeley edited. So who needs them? Greeley might have said, “Go to the Web, young man.”
The trouble is you and I need newspapers. We need them to tell us what is happening in Darfur and eastern Congo; why Russia is playing games with gas supplies to Europe; why our veterans are not getting quality health care; and, yes, what are our elected leaders are doing.
Recently, the bureau system of coverage of Washington has collapsed. There is no one to watch the congressional delegation from Atlanta, San Diego or 100 other cities that once employed reporters in Washington who kept their representatives in the light of scrutiny. Twilight has fallen for the news tradition and with it the transparency of government.
There is no indication that Web-only publishers will generate the kind of wealth that will enable them to replace the ailing newspapers. Like radio, the Web favors commentary not reporting. Opinion cannot be better than the reporting that triggered it.
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The European Dilemma: Austerity or Growth
May 14th, 2012
Guests: Darren Gersh, PBS's "Nightly Business Report"; Laure Mandeville, Le Figaro; Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University
Radio’s impact in Washington and the nation
May 7th, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Host and Program Director, Sirius XM Radio’s POTUS Channel 124
Elections here and abroad; crises in Syria and Sudan
April 30th, 2012
Guests: Arnaud de Borchgrave, CSIS; Ed O'Keefe, The Washington Post; and Christopher Chambers, Georgetown University
Word and phrase origins in the U.S. presidency
April 23rd, 2012
Guests: Paul Dickson, author; Carl Cannon, RealClearPolitics.com
Political “wars” in the 2012 election, and real wars elsewhere
April 16th, 2012
Guests: Michael Fauntroy, George Mason University; Ed Kelley, The Washington Times; Chuck Lewis, Hearst Newspapers