Stop the Presses

February 20, 2009 by Matt Negrin

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Stop the Presses
Obama’s evasive strategy for managing pesky reporters
By Matt Negrin

Three days into his presidency, Barack Obama visited the press corps in the White House briefing room to be friendly with reporters, joking with them and introducing himself. What he didn’t expect was that one of them would still be on the job.

One of Politico’s top reporters, Jonathan Martin, approached Obama and asked why he was nominating a former lobbyist for a top defense post, when he had promised that no former lobbyists would work in his administration.

The president laughed it off. “Ahh, see,” he said, “I came down here to visit. See, this is what happens. I can’t end up visiting with you guys and shaking hands if I’m going to get grilled every time I come down here.”

The reporter tried again, repeating his question. Then Obama became agitated, placing his hand on Martin’s shoulder and staring him down.

“All right, come on,” the president glared. “We will be having a press conference, at which time you can feel free to [ask] questions. Right now, I just wanted to say ‘hello’ and introduce myself to you guys – that’s all I was trying to do.”

But unfortunately for Obama, making friends with the men and women who will cover his presidency isn’t a dream that most of them share. White House reporters have a very specific job: to tell the public what Obama is doing, what he isn’t doing and what he’s hiding. There’s nothing friendly about it.

Granted, the D.C. journalism club mingles with their political sources almost to a fault. The term “Washington insider” now applies not only to policymakers and analysts, but to reporters who have roamed the halls of the Capitol for most of their professions.

Yet for all his promises of fresh government transparency, Obama, just coming off his first full presidential month, has repeatedly bucked reporters and dodged questions, casting a bleak forecast for what may be a trying time for Washington bureaus seeking the truth.

At Obama’s first presidential press conference, on February 9, MSNBC’s Chuck Todd confronted the president on a paradox in his stimulus plan. Todd noted that Obama’s plan encourages increased consumer spending, but asked him if taxpayers should save money and pay down debt before they start putting money back into the economy. In short: Should the American people spend or save?

The president offered a long-winded answer that coursed through a variety of talking points, none of which answered the question. Ultimately, Americans were left with no more clarity than they had before the press conference began.

Yet even before Obama took the helm, he had treated reporters in a few instances as a pesky annoyance rather than the fourth-estate check on his power. In mid-December, Chicago Tribune reporter John McCormick tried to ask the president-elect at a press conference about why his chief of staff gave the embattled Illinois governor a list of names of potential Senate replacements, possibly acting illegally. He was abruptly cut off.

“John, John, let me, let me, let me just cut you off, 'cos I don't want you to waste your question,” Obama interrupted.

The awkward scene was reminiscent of a press conference a few weeks prior, in which a reporter asked Obama why he chose Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state just months after mocking her foreign-policy claims. Obama replied, “This is fun for the press to try to stir up whatever quotes were generated during the course of the campaign. No, I understand. And you’re having fun.”

Throughout the 2008 campaign and for at least four decades, conservatives have hounded the mainstream media for harboring what they call a “liberal bias,” implying that the journalists covering elections and the government are not objective, as their job requires, but instead favor Democrats. This bias, they say, leads to more flattering coverage of liberals and “negative” stories of their opponents.

Proof of such a theory may be hard to find, although in several surveys, many polled reporters claim to align their views liberally. (Whether this seeps into their stories is another question entirely.) Yet if political journalists are so liberal, why have they been confronting Obama whenever they can about the blunders of his infantile presidency – like Rod Blagojevich, Tom Daschle and Judd Gregg, to name a few men who have given the president a growing headache? And why have reporters forced him to evade their questions and instead turn on the press, like John McCain and Sarah Palin repeatedly did in the summer and fall?

Notably absent from the news organizations allowed to ask questions at Obama’s first press conference were The Wall Street Journal, whose editorial pages consistently run conservatively, as well as TIME and Newsweek magazines. And notably present was The Huffington Post, the liberal website that banners more Obama-friendly news than any respected news organization. The president’s decision to call on HuffPo’s blogger was seen by some as an indication of new media’s rise in the digital age, while others – notably the Journal's conservative editorial board – took offense.

If Obama continues to portray his press corps as a menace, the tones of their stories will darken. For example, just an hour after Obama refused to answer that question from Martin, the Politico reporter in the media room, Politico fronted a story on its website with the headline, “Obama flashes irritation in press room.”

But he can appease them in other ways. At the February press conference, CNN’s Ed Henry probably caught Obama off guard by asking him if he would lift the ban on photographs of soldiers’ coffins coming back from war. At the time, Obama avoided an answer, saying, “We are in the process of reviewing those policies in conversations with the Department of Defense, so I don't want to give you an answer now.” Yet such a move would be incredibly popular among photojournalists and editors who want to visually show the human cost of war.

The president has other tools: He can restore more access to records available under the Freedom of Information Act that President Bush shrouded in secrecy. He can undo one of Bush’s executive orders that barred the 1978 Presidential Records Act from making many documents public. He can reverse former Attorney General John Ashcroft’s secrecy policy that agencies have the right to deny FOIA requests whenever they want, provided they have some sort of “legal basis.”

Yet in the end, the press wants respect. Reporters want their questions answered – whether those answers fall in one political ideology or another. What they don’t want is to be ridiculed, mocked or, maybe worst of all, ignored.

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