Local media 1, national media 0
Last week, in the wake of the uproar over Scott McClellan’s new book about the Bush White House, I e-listened in on an online chat with Washington Post reporter Anne Kornblut that I can only describe as surreal (yes, I realize that word is overused). This snippet really blew me away:
SW Nebraska: Will any future president be able to do the job on the press, Congress and the public that George Bush has been able to do? What about the politicization of the Justice Department, science, etc? It seems that McClellan has taken the press to task in his book. Will the press be so cooperative with a President again or has the media been reminded that they actually have an important, difficult job to do?
Anne E. Kornblut: I haven’t read McClellan’s book yet, but really look forward to it, especially on the point you raise. My immediate reaction upon hearing he’d said that was, “Wait, what!? Isn’t it the job of those employed at the White House to be straightforward in the first place?”
(italics mine)
What??? Do all reporters think they’re going to get straight answers from paid shills, I wondered? Can anyone really be that naive?
So I was very relieved to see this comment from Rachel Barnhart on the Channel 13 blog:
Journalists find out pretty quick the job of spokesperson is designed to serve the agency’s best interest. It’s designed to be the mouthpiece for the person at the helm. It’s designed to be a buffer between the media and the top dogs. Sometimes, these positions are purely patronage jobs. Sometimes, spokespeople form a very effective wall between the media and information that serves the public.
I say this after 10 years covering local news. It’s no different on the national level. Government agencies have adopted public relations models that the private sector has used for years. I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s the system….I try to avoid talking to spokespeople for my stories as much as possible.
One of the great mysteries of the past seven years is how a national press corps consisting of ostensibly intelligent and ambitious reporters was so consistently snowed by an administration that seemed incapable of outsmarting anyone.
How on earth can it be that reporters at medium-market tv stations immediately figure out what big ticket national journalists fail to grasp — that spokespeople are there to spin, to shade, to, well, come as close to telling outright lies as possible without getting caught? I don’t have an answer for this. I’m wondering if someone else does.
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The best part of the whole McClellan “revelation” (or statement of the obvious) was big media’s reaction to his criticism of them. Kornblut’s reaction is typical. Brian Williams and Charlie Gibson said similar things — only Katie Couric, who actually did a good job as Pentagon correspondent for NBC when she started, acknowledged that McClellan had a point.
Going way back in history to the Nixon administration, his spokesman Ron Ziegler was similar to McClellan — a not-too-bright retainer who came from Nixon’s home state and was employed because he’d repeat any lie, no matter how silly. Back then, Watergate was broken by reporters on the city beat, not the White House press corps. In other words, the Rachel Barnharts of DC did the legwork, not the better-paid and more famous WH reporters.
The WH press corps has been useless and lazy for a long time, but it’s interesting to see how defensive they are about that well-known and historically consistent fact.
There was already the one CNN reporter (name escapes me, at the moment) who said flat-out that her bosses wanted to tamp down dissent. While I can certainly believe laziness is also a contributing factor on a number of occasions, in this instance, there was definitely pressure from above.
And of course there was, since prior to 911, the WH press corps was having a field day beating up on the moron president select, George the Younger. After 911, everything changed and the questions stopped coming.
Hey, why does the preview window include my Gravatar but not the comment? New plugins, eh?
You’re letting the perfect be the enemy of the good here. We’re just happy the thing is working now.
Even, pre-9/11, all the “beating up” was sound and fury signifying very little, but I agree that even the appearance of questioning authority went out the window in the months after 9/11. And yeah, there was certainly some craven manipulation from the higher-ups.
That said, it’s been well-documented and generally accepted for years that press in a gaggle are pretty useless. But the gaggles are still the prize jobs in journalism. Besides the high-school social dynamics of those groups, there’s just too much trivial bs that occupies the reporters’ bandwidth to permit quality reporting. If you’re in the WH press corps or on the campaign bus, most of your time is reacting to crap manufactured by the administration or the candidate. Joe Average Reporter just doesn’t have time to do much but process and regurgitate what the campaign or admin is feeding him and look for “gaffes” or other deviations from the script. The script itself is rarely challenged.
The primacy of the WH press corps and traveling campaign press corps are anachronisms from the days of print media. Media organizations need to make these entry-level or stringer jobs, and keep the energy and attention of the stars focused on more substantive stuff.
I want an animated, anatomically-correct gravatar. Anything less is an insult to the high standards of the Internet.
In fairness, the Times and the Post do just that — put their star reporters on real stories and have the lower level people do the White House gaggle. You don’t see Dana Priest and Jim Risen at the gaggle.
Yep, it’s the TeeVee that glorifies the WH correspondent: it’s still a short leap from that post to your own show and then to the anchor spot. examples: Dan Rather, Brian Williams and David Gregory.
You guys left out one thing: many of the press weren’t snowed at all, they agreed with Bush.
True that.
With the rise of cable coverage, journalism became an ‘in’ major at college, and schools cranked out not-very-good reporters by the thousands. I guess I am saying the profession has been watered down.
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