Llewellyn

King

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June 30, 2008

Press Coverage of the White House Nearing a Crisis

The White House press corps is having a crisis. It may not interest the rest of the country much, but the problems in the Fourth Estate will, in due time, impact the nature and the completeness of White House coverage.

The ostensible trigger to the current crisis involves the so-called pool reports by members of the print media traveling with the president. But there are deeper problems with the way the presidency is covered by the media.

The White House Correspondents' Association wants to restrict the dissemination of the pool reports. But this action brings up the whole issue of who can afford to travel with the president, when overseas trips cost around $25,000 per correspondent.

The pool is a subset of the press corps traveling with the president, and it is formed in rotation. The pool consists of a print reporter, a wire service reporter, a still photographer, a radio reporter and a television crew. Poolers  travel on Air Force One in order to be close to the president. At some level, it is a death watch.

The purpose of the pool is to tell reporters who cannot be accommodated on Air Force One what happened on board or at events, such as a Vatican visit.

In Washington, the in-town pool accompanies the president to all events where a lot of reporters cannot be admitted, including Oval Office visits by foreign dignitaries, party fund-raising events at private homes and bicycling trips.

Poolers file a brief, colorful and sometimes witty report of the goings-on, or the frustration of being kept from the action. Often, the pool is confined to vans or holding rooms.

The in-town pool rotation works fairly smoothly. The problem is with out-of-town travel, which is so expensive that only the richest news organizations – primarily television and deep-pocketed newspapers – can afford to send their correspondents on a regular basis.

The pool reports are a press corps tradition – a part of the whole business of covering the White House. From time to time, those who write the reports have felt that their work is benefiting reporters who have not paid their way either in pool duty or in expensive travel.

Now some of those reporters, backed up by the board of the White House Correspondents' Association, want to limit the distribution of the pool reports. Their argument is one of pay-to-play, and those making it work for major broadcast outlets and newspapers like The New York Times.

Things have gotten worse for traveling poolers because of the waning interest in the Bush Administration, the financial difficulties of the newspapers and magazines and the shifting of talent and money to the campaigns. Ergo, reporters like Sheryl Stolberg of The New York Times have to file more pool reports on top of their regular work. They see it as an imposition. They want to do short reports for their traveling colleagues, not for the entire White House press corps, to say nothing of the blogosphere.

Traditionally, pool reports were on paper and could only be collected in the White House press room, thus limiting their readership. So the writers could be irreverent, funny and could castigate the White House in a between-ourselves way.

I have to say that I used to publish these reports in a newsletter called White House Weekly. I received no complaints from reporters who seemed to enjoy their new outlet. The Clinton White House sought to stop me and others and failed. The Bush White House has taken a different tack. They disseminate the pool reports to anyone who wants them, including lobbyists and bloggers far from Washington. Consequently, the writers have become more circumspect, their criticism of White House arrangements more mute and their jokes subdued.

The traveling press is now saying: Why should we do this? This is not our job and we are not paid for it.

The new arrangements sanctioned by the White House Correspondents' Association's board, which is chaired by Ann Compton of NBC News and made up almost entirely of representatives of rich news organizations, might have stood, if it had not been for a protest filed by one of the most respected reporters at the White House. He is Mark Silva – a wise and witty writer who covers the White House for The Chicago Tribune. If there were a Pulitzer Prize for pool writing, it would go to Silva.

His argument is that it is hard enough to get information out of the White House, and if the pool reports are filed to only a small section of the media, the public's right to know will be infringed. Silva wrote to his colleagues in the association expressing his concerns. That resulted in a flurry of e-mails and will probably lead to reconsideration of how pool reports are written and disseminated.

Underlying the problems with pool reports are the problems with covering the White House itself.

Permanent White House correspondents are kept in a bubble. They are briefed twice a day – at the off-camera gaggle at 9:30 a.m. and the formal televised briefing at 12:30 p.m. Presidential press conferences and special briefings are few and far between. Otherwise White House pass holders have no advantage over members of the press from, say, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Travel is important because it exposes reporters to the White House staff. But it has become too expensive for most newspapers and wire services. Worse, when the White House wants to get the word out, it often bypasses the White House press corps and goes directly to big-name journalists and television presenters.

For their part, the news organizations tend to pull their best reporters out of the White House as soon as they begin to make their mark. Dana Milbank of The Washington Post, Elizabeth Bumiller of The New York Times, David Gregory of NBC News and Campbell Brown of CNN were pulled out by their employers when their White House coverage was reaching a crescendo. Also, many newspapers have totally given up on covering the White House.

Whether the press corps likes it or not, change is at hand. At least the White House Correspondents' Association still gives the best party in Washington.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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