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Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
March 26, 2009
The Press
Conference, Er, The Program, in the Tightly Controlled White House
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 East Room press conference,
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, if 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.
© 2009 North Star
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