Tantrum at Tiger Beat on the Potomac
If you don’t know that reference, that is the name that Charlie Pierce has given to the execrable Politico. And it also means that you aren’t reading Charlie Pierce on the regular, which you really must start doing. Anyway, they are having a snit about the access that the Obama Administration does not give to the White House Press Corps. This after the same Press Corps has been whinging about not being able to cover the President while he golfs with Tiger Woods. All of this without getting the irony that they are spending more energy in complaining about the President not hanging around to joke with them than they are in explaining any sequester replacement plans. Or maybe climate change policy.
Frankly, lots of bloggers have been all over this, and mostly, Kevin Drum speaks for me. I don’t have any sympathy for these folks whose tough questions sound like high schoolers testing the boundaries of a clique — “Mr. President, Senator McConnell has called you a doodyhead today — how do you respond to that?” is about the level of questioning that I see, really.
I wish I knew what to think about this. Does Obama keep a very, very tight rein on press coverage? Yes, he sure seems to. In fact, every president seems to keep a slightly tighter grip on the reins than the previous one. I’m not very happy about that.
At the same time, the reporters interviewed for this piece seem to be weirdly upset over the fact that the Obama White House uses Twitter and Facebook and releases lots of its own photos. Why is this a problem? It’s 2013, guys. Why shouldn’t a president communicate with the public using whatever mediums the public happens to consume? Over the past century, that’s evolved from whistle-stop tours to radio to TV to Facebook, but so what? Why should reporters be unhappy about this?
They also complain that although the president gives lots of interviews (674 in his first term compared with 217 for George Bush), they’re mostly with local outlets, not with the national reporters “who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.” I’d have more sympathy for this if national reporters really did ask lots of tough, unpredictable questions, but I’m afraid I’m mostly on Obama’s side on this one:
The president’s staff often finds Washington reporters whiny, needy and too enamored with trivial matters or their own self-importance….Obama and his team, especially newly promoted senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, often bemoan the media’s endless chase of superficial and distracting storylines.
Charlie Pierce gives this bit of business the deconstructing it deserves, this piece focusing on Politico’s odd complaint that the Obama White House is making full use of the technology available to it:
The grammar in that second sentence went briefly to the zoo, but I think they’re saying that the White House has more technology and that the media companies have fewer resources. (Something with which TBOTP has had some recent experience, and one might also mention that “media companies” often are struck stupid by cowardice when confronted by candidates who don’t even win. This also contributes to the aforementioned imbalance of power. We continue.) And this is a surprise to approximately nobody who’s watched as the clowns who run America’s newspapers cratered the industry over the past 20 years. If these guys are really making the case that “do more with less” doesn’t work, let them start with overseas bureaus, and not the various loungers in the White House press corps.
Besides my usual eye-rolling about the White House Press talking about mostly silliness, this really is another part of the overall story about how the media comes to grips with the fact that we all have more access to information than ever before. I can safely bypass whatever the WH Press is doing because I have access to other venues who are working on talking to me about policy and issues. And no matter how much info the White House makes available on its own website (which really is alot if you have time to sort through it), you can’t make the mistake of thinking that all of that data isn’t subject to its own shaping by whoever does that in the White House. It would be awesome if the WH Press could tell you that, but they are too busy pouting about not being on a golf trip. Still — if I had the choice between reading Politico for WH news vs. sifting through the WH’s own data, i”m going to do the latter. The horserace BS that Politico specializes in is useful to the company townies, the aspirants to be company townies and the hinterlands journalists who think that the Politico brand means something.
But here is the best thing out there about this new bit of journalists stamping their feet — John Cook from Gawker took a look at the last interview that Mike Allen (of Politico) did with a President, then he tweeted out the questions that Mike Allen asked of GW Bush in 2008. Go see what counts as hard-hitting questions and tough followups. Seriously.
http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2013/02/in-brief-politico-s-article-on-obamas.html
Strong language, but to the point:
“In other words, shut the fuck up and do some reporting. Stop waiting for scraps to dribble from the lips of leaders and go out and do your goddamn jobs. And stop pretending as if stories like Clinton getting oral in the Oval Office or birther bullshit are important at all.
Like maybe reporting about the lack of transparency and the punishing of leakers in this White House as an issue for all of America, not just for a few DC reporters whose asses feel a bit chapped.”
Is it necessary to censor the variant for coitus?
I think the press is jumpy. Just as if you were a number 2 in an organization and suddenly information was somehow getting out around you, you’d be nervous too.
What is at stake is the control of our information. That is no longer strictly in the hands of the main press and their corporate owners, and for us that is a good thing; for their employers, not so much.
With that, a back handed compliment to our own News Journal. They seem to have stepped up this past year in the skill level of their reporting, and they have stopped doing what Tom alludes to above: parroting the official word as it is being dripped out to them…
it is especially delicious on how they frame Stapleford’s utterances, making the Caesar Rodney Collection appear as the Goody Goody Two Shoe Society piece written for the local high school paper.
Again, today’s main stream national television press core consists of mostly pretty faces. They didn’t get into that position by hard work… They probably don’t know how to even get original information.
The “President is manipulating the press” story is like the deficit. It only exists when there is a Democrat in the White House.
@Kavips The modern press doesn’t simply not how to even get original information, they’ve said that is isn’t their job.
They’ve been very transparent about the fact that they view their role as recording talking points from “both sides” and asserting that the truth may be somewhere in between.
To be fair, I do think that the press did whine at the GWB interaction with the WH Press Corps too. Especially their tendency to preference local news outlets over the national ones. The difference here, I think, is that GWB gave them nicknames and rubbed their tummies. I can’t imagine why they would think that once they let one off of the hook, they are all off of the hook. But the point that the Rude Pundit makes in Tom Hawk’s great link is absolutely true. Stop waiting for them to give you the news and just go get it. The value of news outlets is in the information they provide now, not in the news outlet itself.
Cassandra called Michael Lewis’s piece in Vanity Fair about Obama a “must read”:
http://delawareliberal.net//2012/09/16/sunday-open-thread-9-16-12/
By Lewis’s own admission on NPR, it took golf course access to make this “must read” piece happen. Lewis also admitted the White House was allowed to review and vet the entire piece:
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/12/161003362/michael-lewis-studies-obamas-way
To most people, that makes it worthless propoganda. Which makes me wonder if Cassandra’s real complaint with the WH press corps and politico is not that they want golf course access (after all, that results in “must read” journalism) but that they are not as fawning as the WH twitter feed and don’t allow Obama to vet their work.
Dan: You might be right, but I take issue with your comparison of a one-off piece of journalism/hagiography with the kabuki process of the White House beat.
The problems with Politico are many and varied, but the problem with this story is that nobody wants to hear someone whine about why they can’t do a better job.
On the other hand, maybe the only real stories can be found on the golf course. From HuffPo:
Obama Golfed With Oil Men As Climate Protesters Descended On White House
…On his first “guys weekend” away since he was reelected, the president chose to spend his free time with Jim Crane and Milton Carroll, leading figures in the Texas oil and gas industry, along with other men who run companies that deal in the same kinds of carbon-based services that Keystone would enlarge. They hit the links at the Floridian Yacht and Golf Club, which is owned by Crane and located on the Treasure Coast in Palm City, Fla.
Carroll is the chairman of CenterPoint Energy, a public utility company based in Houston, Texas. He is not a major donor to political candidates, having given just $5,800 since 2007, including a $2,300 donation to Obama’s first presidential campaign. CenterPoint Energy benefited from the 2009 federal stimulus law signed by Obama through its receipt of $200 million in federal grant money to upgrade its system to a Smart Grid.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/20/obama-climate-protest_n_2719338.html
Which makes me wonder if Cassandra’s real complaint with the WH press corps and politico is not that they want golf course access (after all, that results in “must read” journalism) but that they are not as fawning as the WH twitter feed and don’t allow Obama to vet their work.
If this was actually my complaint, I would have specifically said that. Quote approval as a condition of interviews isn’t exactly new. Which leads me to believe that this commenter isn’t paying attention to much at all. Quote approval and all of the other rules and conditions that the press gets confronted with can be denied. And then these reporters would have to go about getting their stories the old fashioned way. But they say yes everytime. Which is how you know that the access is more important to them than the information. And it is how you know that their own real estate isn’t nearly as valuable as it used to me.
And you should hear the entire Lewis interview on that piece, rather than rely on that quick summary. It was quite illuminating.
Here’s the take on this from Morning Joe today . . .
http://www.mediaite.com/tv/morning-joe-chides-spoiled-pampered-press-corps-for-complaining-about-access-to-obama/