Veteran Journalists: Today's White House Reporters Are Too Timid

[AntZ]

Veteran Journalists: Today's White House Reporters Are Too Timid

By Paul Bedard

Posted: May 17, 2011




Several veteran and prize-winning journalists who covered presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush say that the current crop of White House correspondents are too timid and deferential and have played a role in killing the impact of presidential news conferences.

"If you watch an Obama news conference, and watched a Bush news conference previous to that, where correspondents sit in their seats with their hands folded on their laps, [it's] as if they are in the room with a monarch and they have to wait to be recognized by the president," says Sid Davis, the former NBC Washington bureau chief who covered nine presidents. "It looks like they are watching a funeral service at [Washington funeral firm] Joseph Gawler's and it shouldn't be that way."


Adds Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Haynes Johnson, "It's all very stale, very structured, very pale."

And longtime NBC and ABC reporter Sander Vanocur: "You want to know what's wrong with the press? The press is what's wrong with the press."

They and others anchored a media panel Monday night organized by the White House Historical Association to herald the 50th anniversary of the first live televised news conference, conducted by JFK. Former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry moderated the discussion from the very same State Department Dean Acheson Auditorium where Kennedy eventually conducted 60 televised news conferences with ease and humor.

Each of the journalists attended the press conferences and were blunt on JFK's style and honesty.

When the topic turn to today's White House press corps, the grizzled veterans were dismissive, calling them weak imitations of their Cold War predecessors.

Davis says "I don't like today's news conferences" with the president. Kennedy's, he says, were "thoroughly unrehearsed, natural and they worked to a large extent." Today's versions, he adds, "look like they are rehearsed."


Worse, he says, reporters look like stenographers. "I think democracy is noisy. The news conferences should get to back to what they were even if people are going to raise their voices."

Former Today Show newsman John Palmer went to so far as to suggest that a weakened press, a 24-hour news cycle, coupled with presidents who don't like live press conferences, have killed the impact of the events. "I think we are witnessing the demise of the televised news conference. I think its time is past," he says.

"The news conference won't have the big command that it had before," he adds.

McCurry, however, says that the situation hasn't become that bad. "Reports of the press conference's death are exaggerated, I think," he says. "Presidents will need a forum like that to clear the air and give at least the appearance of accountability--and the press will continue to want to demonstrate its relevance by standing up and speaking truth to power."

But he conceded that what Palmer called the "golden age" of presidential news conferences, like the videos of an engaging JFK shown at the panel discussion, might be over. Presidents who don't like press conferences will labor through them but they won't have the magic of some of what we watched last night," says McCurry.


http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/05/17/veteran-journalists-todays-white-house-reporters-are-too-timid

[FBD]

Like Anita Dunn said, "We control the press. We control the message we want to get out, presented how we want it presented."

I'll bet she thought people would think that made them "technically savvy" or something :lol:

[Deepsepia]

The White House Press Corps is very thin these days. It used to be that you'd have White House correspondents for all these quality local papers-- they're gone. Papers like the Baltimore Sun . . . a shadow of what it was.

So at press conferences what you get are reporters trying to get themselves on TV.

There still is good journalism -- but not at the Press Conferences. The other thing is that the Administrations have gotten so professional at managing information that they're not likely to say anything much . . . they have the character of a well prepared deposition.

The "good stuff" in reporting comes from folks digging for sources, using FOIA, not the stuff that the Administration wants to tell you. There's actually plenty of that kind of reporting, and its much easier to do today. It used to be that getting court documents, for example, required you to physically go to a courthouse, and maybe you could request a copy, or maybe examine a document in the Clerk's office-- now there's so much online.

But guts are still required and they do show up, even if White House press conferences aren't the place. Probably the most dramatic confrontation between a news organization and the folks they cover was when Bloomberg News sued to force the Federal Reserve to reveal what institutions they were lending to during the financial crisis (they won-- this was a very big deal)



Nov. 7 2008(Bloomberg) -- Bloomberg News asked a U.S. court today to force the Federal Reserve to disclose securities the central bank is accepting on behalf of American taxpayers as collateral for $1.5 trillion of loans to banks.

The lawsuit is based on the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, which requires federal agencies to make government documents available to the press and the public, according to the complaint. The suit, filed in New York, doesn't seek money damages.

``The American taxpayer is entitled to know the risks, costs and methodology associated with the unprecedented government bailout of the U.S. financial industry,'' said Matthew Winkler, the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, a unit of New York-based Bloomberg LP, in an e-mail.


There are also bloggers and other non-traditional media . . . many are terrible, but a few are very good. In particular, I'd say that the blogs kept by academics present excellent information and expert opinion about stuff that is technical. On Fukushima, for example, I've followed two podcasts by nuclear engineers (Arne Gundersen and Michael Mervine) -- both added a lot.

And "amateur" networks can do wonders-- it was folks logging tail numbers who provided the information that broke the story of the CIA's rendition/secret prisons.