Let's Talk Press, Part 1: From Spotlight to Flashlight

Not all traditions are good ones.  I can think of hereditary rule, female genital mutilation, fraternity hazing, and bullfighting, for starters.  Saying “bless you” after someone sneezes may count, too.  It implies that the person who sneezed needs some sort of divine intervention in their sinuses.  A sneeze is just an involuntary expulsion of air; as with many other involuntary expulsions, perhaps we should just start saying “excuse me” after we sneeze.

Mid-way through this month, Mr. Trump floated the idea of canceling another tradition, the daily White House Press Briefing.  Is this briefing a bad tradition?  Sadly enough, many people in the press itself seem to think so.  But let's examine how it came about in the first place.

Like many things in our modern government, the position of White House Press Secretary, the White House Press Corps, and the daily briefings all did not suddenly appear under the leadership of one particular President.  They evolved over time into what we know today from previous, more inefficient policies and methods.  The first reporter who regularly hung out at the White House was a gentleman named William W. Price from the Washington Evening Star.  This was during President Grover Cleveland's first term at the tail end of the 19th Century.  News competition being what it is, the Evening Star's competitors wanted someone of their own to regularly cover the White House beat, and by the time of the Spanish-American War the group of reporters had grown into a sizable corps.  Teddy Roosevelt provided them a space of their own when he built the West Wing.  Woodrow Wilson started holding regular conferences with the press, and this led to the formation of the White House Correspondents' Association – the first president of which was William W. Price.

From there we begin to see the modern White House press system emerge.  President Wilson's private secretary established a schedule of briefing the press each day, in the mornings.  These continued under the later administration of Herbert Hoover.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the first President to designate a staffer with the sole responsibility of maintaining a relationship with the press, thereby creating the position of Press Secretary.  From then on, the system as we know it today has basically been the same: a large group of reporters from dozens of news agencies receiving daily briefings and regular conferences with the President, in their own space in the West Wing.

However, it seems that one tweet from our current President can draw the whole system into question.  Instead of briefing the press daily and taking questions, Mr. Trump suggested via Twitter that he could just hand out written statements “for the sake of accuracy.”  Many in the media lauded this idea.  Jake Novak of CNBC called the daily press briefings “political class navel gazing,” a “taxpayer funded game of 'gotcha,'” and called out his fellows in the media for sorely lacking humility.  (Mr. Novak's other recent credits include a contention that healthcare is a commodity that should be earned, and a defense of Trump's slash-and-burn budget plan.)  James Warren in Vanity Fair was also critical of his fellow reporters, calling them out for grandstanding and being too hungry for any access the White House is willing to give.  (Warren did not support the idea of ending the briefings, however.)  Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner encouraged reporters to stop going to the briefings instead of letting the Administration cancel them, as they are a “worthless... exercise in futility, where a lot of noise is made in return for little actual news.”  Robert Wasinger of The Hill called Trump's instincts “on the money,” inaccurately stated the daily briefings were instituted under Nixon, bolstered the notion that the briefings are a “gotcha” game, and favored ending them so that the press would lose its chief tool to destroy an Adminstration that “they despise with a passion.”  Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich went further, saying the press itself was damaging the republic, and that ending the briefings would also end 90% of the current Administration's problems.   Sean Hannity famously pontificated that the President himself could simply tweet his accomplishments directly to the public, without the filter of the media.

The general attitude of those in favor of this change is that the press itself has become a celebrity business.  Reporters, inflated with their own sense of importance, attend these briefings in the hopes of catching out an Administration official or spokesperson and becoming the next Bob Woodward or Carl Bernstein by doing so.  In response, the Administration twists itself into pretzels by avoiding these kinds of confrontations, dodging or outright ignoring questions.  They expend oxygen to create sound, without any valuable information being conveyed in that sound.  Rather than go through this back-and-forth ritual, which eats up a whole 45 minutes of a reporter's work day, the Administration could take the time to craft coherent written briefings to the press that accurately report the day's affairs, and any questions from them could be vetted and responded to in writing as well.  It would limit the alleged co-dependence of the media and the news-makers, which many in the public see as a class all to their own.  This feeling is best exemplified in the annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner, where politicians and pundits mingle and self-congratulate, content in their positions high atop the American social pyramid.

It's a tempting way to look at things, especially these days.  It plays into the widespread distrust of the media as a whole, made even worse by Trump's infantile doling out of the term “fake news.”  As I hope to lay out in a future piece, America has stopped trusting itself to a great degree, so seeing an enemy in a routine is easy, especially if that routine is carried out by those with power or privilege.  But this is the problem with the Trump era of politics: too much trust is being placed in one narcissistic, thin-skinned, and dangerously ignorant man.  Ending the press briefings places the power of crafting the Administration's image and reputation entirely in the hands of the Administration itself.  Far too many in the media would be too blinded by their own self-flagellation (or Trump loyalty) that they would go along with this sanctioning of propaganda.

That is what news prepared by politicians is, propaganda.  I'm used to crafting press releases; the general idea is to give something to report to the media outlets you're notifying: a “there there,” so to speak.  At the level of government I once occupied, press releases tend to be ignored, either because of the limited manpower or the limited page space in local print news.  On the occasions the releases are picked up, the reporters themselves don't just reprint the releases as they are received – and well they shouldn't.  They follow up, they call and ask questions, they corroborate what you say with what others say, and in the end, they come out with their own article.  It's not because they are conceited and want to take the credit for breaking this world-altering news about a pending zoning change or property tax reduction.  It's because they want to hold you accountable; you, the politician, with a vested interest in making yourself look good.

The daily White House Press Briefings might feel futile because the players in them all seem to have only their own interests at heart.  However, one should not discount this tradition simply because it seems motivated by self-interest.  The reporters want to look good by finding a story, and the Administration wants to look good in the stories they provide.  Let them.  The reporters want to look good because finding a story means they are doing their job well.  The Administration wants to look good in the stories they provide because that means they are doing their job well.  What this creates is an atmosphere of pressure.  It shines a bright and piercing spotlight on every Presidential administration, which should always, constantly, be there.

The mark of a good Administration is one which can handle this kind of pressure, and look good even in the brightest of media light.  The Obama Administration managed this kind of pressure well, mostly because they presided over a period of strong economic growth and common-sense foreign and domestic policy.  There were no true scandals during Obama's tenure, and his Administration did not damage our reputation with our closest allies, nor abuse its power, nor seek to disenfranchise or oppress millions here at home.  Contrast this with the other most recent Administrations, Trump's and Bush's.  Under Trump, the story since day one has been scandal, be it Trump's myriad ties to the Russian oligarchy, his terminations of key officials, his plans to assault the middle and lower classes with his tax and healthcare plans, or his utter ineptitude at a job that he didn't realize was so difficult.  Under Bush, we were actively fighting two wars, one of which was initiated on utterly false pretenses, and during which we did not catch the perpetrators of the September 11th attacks.  The Bush Administration also abused its power to punish its enemies (Valerie Plame), utterly botched the response to Hurricane Katrina, and failed to act responsibly to prevent the worst economic recession in recent years.

During these administrations, White House Press Briefings were absolutely a game of “gotcha,” because that was the game the press needed to be playing.  Imagine if the only information received from the Bush, Obama, or Trump administrations was in carefully crafted and vetted written statements – or worse yet, tweets.  There would be no pressure on any of them to respond to an angry, confused, or otherwise engaged public when the news of the day broke.  Explanations could be delayed or outright withheld, and in a day and age when media distrust is at its highest, an administration withholding information could easily be overlooked – it wouldn't be a scandal, but instead a news outlet whining about its lack of access (i.e. business).  Spokespeople wouldn't have to corroborate statements from other politicians or staffers, and wouldn't have to speak in the moment about a coherent and competent Administration.  Instead, they could wait a few hours, or a day or two, and use their best spin doctors to craft a false narrative that portrays that kind of competence.  The spotlight of the press would dwindle to a flashlight, only illuminating a part of the story at any one time, and often only the parts the Administration would choose to show.

Absolutely there needs to be a reform of the media industry, but it won't come from limiting their access or browbeating them about their status.  It will come instead from a treatment of the Fourth Estate as a responsible and active player in our nation's democracy – and I hope to come up with what might be a working set of reforms in next week's piece.