New York Times White House correspondent David Sanger offered a bone weary farewell to Scott McClellan in Sunday’s edition of the paper. Along the way, he suggests abandoning the press briefings, and that cameras in the press room have turned reporters into posturing juveniles.
On the last point, I can attest from a decade of writing, producing and sometimes directing a variety of corporate, commercial and news feature videos that cameras do not come equipped with a button compelling reporters to “strut,” as Sanger puts it. Cameras do not nullify free will. Cameras are not a drug. Televising the briefings did not assure “that their nature would change,” or that reporters would “look like angry twits.”
Twit-hood is a self-inflicted condition, and lord knows reporters indulge in it off camera at least as much as they do on. The cameras, and C-SPAN’s massive press briefing audience, have nothing to do with it. And in fact, the only people who seem bothered by the occasionally aggressive behavior of reporters are McClellan and administration supporters. If you follow the press criticism trail, the primary complaint is that reporters aren’t aggressive enough, and don’t ask smart questions.
Sanger says the cameras have gradually rendered the press briefings useless. We don’t find them so — although it’s getting increasingly irritating when McClellan doesn’t call on our correspondent, Eric Brewer, as happened again today despite relatively light attendance — and to the extent others do, the cameras are not the culprits. The guilt goes to the administration, who have concocted a policy of marginalizing the press, and to the press, who have concocted a policy of marginalizing themselves.
Asking questions isn’t a problem for Sanger, who sits in the second row and gets one or more opportunities every time he shows up. His complaint is that the briefings no longer generate stories, but a calculatedly uncommunicative administration is a story. A press secretary who’s willing to look stupid or demented in service of a policy aimed at obscuring or distorting information is a story. A press secretary who will leak information anonymously rather than provide it in public is a story; the problem is that reporters rarely report it.
It’s understandable, from a hidebound, clueless perspective, that editors don’t want to spend column inches on stories addressing what Sanger describes as McClellan’s “deliberately robotic” performance, but comparisons between what the administration’s official spokesman does or doesn’t say and the information reporters gather outside the press room are useful, and we don’t often get them.
There’s also value in making a public record of questions you know won’t get an answer, or at least not a comprehensible or responsive one. Those questions osmose into the public discourse in a way they wouldn’t have before the advent of cameras in the press room. But again, reporters seem reluctant to ask questions the press secretary or some among the audience might find offensive; they’ll hammer McClellan on issues that personally affect them, such as his insistence that Rove and Libby weren’t involved in the Plame leak — “You lied to us! To us!” — but they’re delicate amnesiacs on larger matters — no one seems to think the 60 Minutes story indicating Bush knew well in advance of the Iraq invasion the likelihood that Iraq had banned weapons was slim warrants a follow up — and from what Sanger says about his pleasant evenings chatting with McClellan over dinner at the ranch in Crawford, that delicacy extends to off the record sessions as well.
Sanger eventually gets around to acknowledging that cameras aren’t in fact the problem, and that the administration is (reporters remain innocent victims).
It’s too late to turn the television cameras off, of course. But it’s always possible to go back to the quiet ways press secretaries had for giving depth and texture to reporters, even if they were spinning along the way. The 6 p.m. phone call to explain the president’s thinking, or some internal debate, seems to be a lost art (and a hard one, now, because it violates the new aversion to citing yet another “senior administration official”). Whether that changes depends on whether the president wants to explain himself differently. Some of Mr. Bush’s aides — speaking on background, of course, because they are not authorized to talk to reporters about this stuff — say he has built the kind of press operation he wants.
As for me, after I’m done fixing that hinge on my chair, I’ll return to my daydreams about what it must have been like covering Calvin Coolidge, whose tightlipped pronouncements from his porch in Vermont must have inspired this White House. But at least when those briefings were over, there was a nice stream down the hill where reporters could cast for brook trout, and forget about the empty pages in their notebooks.
“Damn, that was useless. Oh well: fellas, what say we go fishin’?”
UPDATE: We didn’t write about the 60 Minutes interview with former CIA official Tyler Drumheller, in which he revealed that top US officials including the president had been informed that a highly placed CIA asset in Iraq said there were no banned weapons in Iraq nearly a year before the invasion, but many, many people have done.
New York Times: Cameras turn reporters into twits
New York Times White House correspondent David Sanger offered a bone weary farewell to Scott McClellan in Sunday’s edition of the paper. Along the way, he suggests abandoning the press briefings, and that cameras in the press room have turned reporters into posturing juveniles.
On the last point, I can attest from a decade of writing, producing and sometimes directing a variety of corporate, commercial and news feature videos that cameras do not come equipped with a button compelling reporters to “strut,” as Sanger puts it. Cameras do not nullify free will. Cameras are not a drug. Televising the briefings did not assure “that their nature would change,” or that reporters would “look like angry twits.”
Twit-hood is a self-inflicted condition, and lord knows reporters indulge in it off camera at least as much as they do on. The cameras, and C-SPAN’s massive press briefing audience, have nothing to do with it. And in fact, the only people who seem bothered by the occasionally aggressive behavior of reporters are McClellan and administration supporters. If you follow the press criticism trail, the primary complaint is that reporters aren’t aggressive enough, and don’t ask smart questions.
Sanger says the cameras have gradually rendered the press briefings useless. We don’t find them so — although it’s getting increasingly irritating when McClellan doesn’t call on our correspondent, Eric Brewer, as happened again today despite relatively light attendance — and to the extent others do, the cameras are not the culprits. The guilt goes to the administration, who have concocted a policy of marginalizing the press, and to the press, who have concocted a policy of marginalizing themselves.
Asking questions isn’t a problem for Sanger, who sits in the second row and gets one or more opportunities every time he shows up. His complaint is that the briefings no longer generate stories, but a calculatedly uncommunicative administration is a story. A press secretary who’s willing to look stupid or demented in service of a policy aimed at obscuring or distorting information is a story. A press secretary who will leak information anonymously rather than provide it in public is a story; the problem is that reporters rarely report it.
It’s understandable, from a hidebound, clueless perspective, that editors don’t want to spend column inches on stories addressing what Sanger describes as McClellan’s “deliberately robotic” performance, but comparisons between what the administration’s official spokesman does or doesn’t say and the information reporters gather outside the press room are useful, and we don’t often get them.
There’s also value in making a public record of questions you know won’t get an answer, or at least not a comprehensible or responsive one. Those questions osmose into the public discourse in a way they wouldn’t have before the advent of cameras in the press room. But again, reporters seem reluctant to ask questions the press secretary or some among the audience might find offensive; they’ll hammer McClellan on issues that personally affect them, such as his insistence that Rove and Libby weren’t involved in the Plame leak — “You lied to us! To us!” — but they’re delicate amnesiacs on larger matters — no one seems to think the 60 Minutes story indicating Bush knew well in advance of the Iraq invasion the likelihood that Iraq had banned weapons was slim warrants a follow up — and from what Sanger says about his pleasant evenings chatting with McClellan over dinner at the ranch in Crawford, that delicacy extends to off the record sessions as well.
Sanger eventually gets around to acknowledging that cameras aren’t in fact the problem, and that the administration is (reporters remain innocent victims).
“Damn, that was useless. Oh well: fellas, what say we go fishin’?”
UPDATE: We didn’t write about the 60 Minutes interview with former CIA official Tyler Drumheller, in which he revealed that top US officials including the president had been informed that a highly placed CIA asset in Iraq said there were no banned weapons in Iraq nearly a year before the invasion, but many, many people have done.