What To Do With the Briefing Room?

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math

In addition to agreeing with, well, little ol' me that the hunting accident may have been a better A1 story than the Iraq war, the Medicare bill, or the budget, Jay Rosen hits on the key point on display during Cheneyshotaguyintheface-gate. The Bush approach to press relations is radically different from any previous President, and the press corps either can't tell or doesn't care:

Other White Houses had a “line of the day” they wanted to push. None had a spokesman like Scott McClellan who, no matter what the question, will mindlessly repeat the line of the day as a way of showing journalists that they have no rights to an answer. That isn’t “spin,” although it may superficially look like spin. That’s shutting down the podium and emptying out the briefing room without saying you’re doing it.

To the Bush team, the national press corps isn't an independent body; it's simply another medium for propogating the Presidential message. Reading transcripts, one wonders why the reporters bother showing up anymore; after all, they have other work and other potential sources. Perhaps they're trying to find a way to hack the McLellatron 3000 (for which I'd give credit to the originator, but google is being uncooperative) and think that with just one more shot in the briefing room, they'll ask just the right question that crashes its security system, giving them access to the codes for Zion's mainframe. Or the Presidential Daily Briefings. Or ... something.

Constructive reactions to the Bush rules of government/media relations are hard to come by; Rosen suggests that the press has avoided reacting negatively to avoid the appearance of seeming too political. But that decision can be un made. Individual media members could certainly decide that they can get greater credibility and ratings by antagonizing the executive the way Keith Olbermann has. But even without such changes, there is already at least one workable model for the press corps' new role: the "Investigative reporter" on local news. If you've ever watched it, you know this character, the man (or woman) on the 6:00 news who is always digging up sensationalist headlines about seemingly small potatoes: fradulent recycling companies, individual sex offenders, gang graffiti in air cargo holds, ... stuff that's surely a nuisance, but not world-ending. He finds a provacative topic, shoves his camera in the face of someone for official comment, and more often than not finds a security guard trying to cover the lens. It's this style ... though not the substance ... that DC reporters could start emulating. They would have change their writing patterns to give greater weight to independent, sometimes partisan, analysis rather than official statements. They would have to react to evasive maneuvers with harsher coverage, as we saw to some extent with Cheny's shooting incident. And they would have to give up existing favorable coverage-for-access relationships, which currently fail to yield accurate reporting. None of these ideas are groundbreaking; if Dana Milibank would like to teach his colleagues how its done, he just has to point them to the local news.