Good News, Bad News

Author Ken Auletta pens a piece in the current issue of The New Yorker titled "Fortress Bush:How the white House keeps the press under control"

The article isn't online, however a brief Q&A with The New Yorker’s Daniel Cappello and Auletta offers a taste.

A few excepts from Auletta's piece, which is IMO, worth the price of the magazine.

Last August, in Crawford, Texas, george W. Bush gave a barbecue for the press corps. Bush has let it be knownn that he's not much of a tlevison-news watcher or a newspaper reader, apart from the sport'ssection; and during a conversations with reporters he explained, perhaps without intending to, why this White House often seems indifferent to the press.

"How do you then know what the public thinks?" a reporter asked, according to Bush aides and reporters who heard the exchange. And Bush replied, "You're making a huge assumption—that you represent what the public thinks."

Exactamundo.

Karl Rove, the President's closest political advisor, says of Bush, "He has a cagey respect them"—the press. "he understands their job is to do a job. And that's ot necessarliy to report news. it's to get a headline or a story to their magazine, newspaper, or television more."

According to Rove, Bush sees the press as "elistist" and thinks that the social and economic backgrounds of most reporters have nothing in common with those of most Americans...Reporters, for their part, see the White House as a fortress.

Chief of Staff Andrew Card opines that the press doesn't represent the public any more than other people do. "In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election...I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function." Card continues on press standards:

"It used to be an expectation—that I had, anyway—that before a 'fact' showed up in an article there were two sources to that 'fact' or the'fact' was there; it was put on the table. I see an awful lot of things now that look like, at best, there is one source. And the media outlets runs with that source. And it's wrong."

Card blamed the pressure of competition for this. When asked how the press could get more sources when the Bush Administration wouldn't return their calls.

"It's not our job to be sources," he replied, flushing. "The taxpayers don't pay us to leak!...I feel strongly that people who get paid taxpayers dollars should be doing their job. If their job is like Ashley's"—Ashley Snee, a member of the press staff, who sat in on the interview— "if their job is to talk to the press, they should talk to the press. If their job is to help develop policy, it's to talk to the people who are involved in that policy-making process...Our job is not to make your job easy."

Auletta examines the WH media team, the press corps and various journalist's relationship, or lack thereof, with the WH as well as interviewing. Much of the article takes the reader through a day in the WH press corps. Auletta manages a few snarky bits, but in the main the article offers a different view of the WH than that painted by the media as waffling and ill-informed. The Bush Administration is not plugged into the press leak machine, this WH is disciplined enough to resist the siren call of the media 15 minutes-of-fame game that so often obscured Clinton's message. From this reader's viewpoint, it is reassuring that our president knows who he is, what he wants to accomplish and that his team is managing a politically-opposed press corps very effectively. No mean feat .

The article sums up:

...,"the Bush Administration appears to believe that the power of the White House press corps is slowly ebbing. "I think when viewed through a historical lens the role and importance of the White House prescorps today have diminshed—perhaps significantly: (Bush media Advisor)Mark McKinnon says. "Drudge—Matt Drudge's popular Internet blog—"and non-stop cable news have created a virtual real-time news invironment...White House press briefings today are televised"—instantly posted on the Internet. McKinnon discerns a potent mixture of frustration and ennui among White House reporters: "They are all alpha dogs. The cream of the journalistic crop. They have arrived. They have made it to the top. And they discover, to their dismay, they are not as important as they thought they would be. Or should be. And, in fact, many are flat bored. It's always been the hottest beat for the best reporters. And now they sit in real-time limbo, lost in the dust of the Internet and cable."

One can only hope.

Posted by feste at January 18, 2004 11:03 AM | TrackBack