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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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A Farewell to Tony Snow
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Now we must turn down an empty glass for Tony Snow. The expression comes from “The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam,” as translated from the Persian by the English eccentric Edward FitzGerald. The FitzGerald translation also gave us “The moving finger writes and having writ, moves on . . .” and many other quotable lines.
Anyway at one time, journalists, particularly those who worked for newspapers, liked to treat “The Rubaiyat” as a kind of drinking song without music. It was very popular in saloons frequented by journalists, who insisted on being called newspapermen or women. It wasn’t until the rise of television that “journalist,” an old-fashioned term, reemerged probably because newspapermen and women were appearing more and more on TV.
When we lost one of our own, we’d turn down an empty glass. We’d also upend a few bottles as we mourned our loss; another good soul destined for that great newsroom in the sky.
Journalism is a soberer business nowadays, and the old practices have largely died out. Unfortunately in dismantling our vices, mostly drinking and a pervasive inability to handle money, we’ve also lost our ability to grieve collectively, to hug and to cry.
Even so, much of the Washington journalistic population, and the White House press corps in particular, are walking around shocked. Tony Snow is dead. We all feared it was coming, and also believed it wouldn’t happen. Not our Tony. Even the atheists among us hoped for some divine intervention; some triumph of the human spirit, so plentiful in Snow, over the evil of metastasizing cancer.
After all, we are a sentimental lot; conservative about our trade and profligate with our adoration, if we can find someone we feel worthy of it. There’s the rub. We live in a world of ambitious and disingenuous politicians who buy their opinions wholesale and will pirouette on a dime if there’s a vote or campaign contribution to be had. We are not cynical; we are lovelorn, short of people to admire–editors and proprietors, as well as politicians.
Tony was one of us and one of them, but fundamentally we thought he was one of us. Sure he’d written speeches for Reagan, subbed for the polemicist Rush Limbaugh, and wore the colors of George W. Bush. We didn’t care.
Snow knew that we go to the White House briefings and press conferences to get the facts, not to debate policy. He knew that everyone of us had an appointment with a word processor or a camera moments after he left the podium, He respected our struggle, and we respected his.
Sadly, the last time I saw Snow was at a funeral for CBS broadcaster Ivan Scott. Snow sat with my wife, Linda Gasparello, and me. Toward the end of the Mass, Snow went over to Scott’s widow, Sarah, and hugged her for the longest time, in a gesture made the more poignant because we all knew that he was fighting the same disease that carried off Ivan. Also, he appeared to be the only present or recent White House official who showed up. He was like that.
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The lost art of debate — and other wordy topics
February 6th, 2012
Guests: Aram Bakshian, author and critic; Atul Singh, Fair Observer
Obama’s strengths and weaknesses; the Internet
January 23rd, 2012
Guests: Tim Farley, Sirius XM Radio; Adam Clayton Powell III, University of Southern California; Wayne Madsen, Wayne Madsen Report
A discussion of Shirley’s book, “December 1941: 31 Days That Saved America and Changed the World”
January 16th, 2012
Guest Craig Shirley, author
World events as the U.S. elections get fully underway
January 9th, 2012
Guests Arnaud de Borchgrave, Center for Strategic and International Studies; Andrei Sitov, Itar-Tass; Al Leeds, The Washington Post
The Joys of Transportation
January 2nd, 2012
Guests Bill Gouse, Transportation Consultant – Originally Broadcast October 16, 2011