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Article Excerpt
No matter who is president or who is doing the reporting, there is continuity in the press coverage a president receives and the news organizations with whom he regularly meets. When a new president occupies the Oval Office on January 20, 2009, he will have a waiting press corps already settled into its Press Room quarters. There will be people in place who covered his predecessors and established routines observed by media organizations concerning what news they want their reporters to gather and how they want them to do it. The more the new president and his staff understand about the workings of news organizations and the place of the White House in their reporting system, the better they will be able to make their connection to the American people.
On a day-in-day-out basis, the White House press corps is the president's link to the public. The press is the vehicle he uses to deliver information personally and to do so through surrogates as well. News organizations regularly carry his remarks and daily staff press briefings from the White House. The president also routinely meets with reporters in the White House press corps to respond to their queries and to make his own points.
For news organizations, the White House remains today the prestige beat it has been since at least the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration, although current financial pressures have led some to cut back on the kind of coverage they once had (Hess 1981, 49). At the time of his inauguration, the president becomes a world leader with his every move followed by news organizations on almost every continent, not just in North America. Unlike other news beats, the White House is one combining attention to the chief executive as a person as well as a policy maker, to the institution of the presidency, and to the White House staff who serve him. Elite news organizations, particularly the wire services and the major newspapers as well as radio and television networks, commit major economic resources to the coverage of the president in order to cover all of his public moves domestically and abroad and track what is going on inside the building.
Although news organizations may send reporters to the White House on specific issues, there is a cadre of news people who give the public its daily information on what the president is doing and that forms the basis of what we know about the chief executive's statements and actions. In this article I identify ways to distinguish what constitutes the core of the White House press corps, a term used loosely by scholars, observers, reporters, and officials alike. Second, I look at what reporters view as the elements of a White House story and the continuity over time and across media in what reporters look for and how they obtain information.
The Challenges of the White House Beat
The White House is a challenging beat, first, because of the difficulty in getting information reporters want and, second, because of the breadth of the issues to be covered. Reporters cannot roam the halls of the West Wing or, since the Lyndon Johnson administration, the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in search of people and stories. On the Hill, in contrast, members of Congress and their personal and committee staff are easy to locate and interview. In addition, since the 1970s reporters have extensive access to committee meetings, sessions marking up legislation, and hearings. The House of Representatives and the Senate are accessible institutions whose members and their leaders meet regularly with members of the press corps.
The White House beat is difficult because presidents and their staffs make efforts to direct reporters to certain kinds of information and away from others. Presidents and their aides have long been interested in making news when they choose with information they want released. For reporters covering the White House, getting information they seek rather than what the White House wants them to have is a challenge that is at the heart of their job (Grossman and Kumar 1981, 181-205).
The test of getting what information they want is one that has faced journalists covering presidents for as long as the White House has been a regular news beat. In describing how he covered the White House at the beginning of the twentieth century, William Price of the Washington Evening Star, one of the first newsmen regularly assigned to the White House, noted that officials did not provide reporters with what the newsmen considered to be news. They had to find it. "The news secured at the White House is nearly always the result of the efforts of the newspapermen themselves," he said. "Their acquaintance with public men all over the country, with cabinet officers and departmental officials, enables them to get the first start or 'tip.... These same friends develop the story for them, upon inquiry. Sometimes it's a question of hard digging, as the miner puts it, to unravel a 'story' " (Price 1902). Reporting from the White House has always meant turning up information stones elsewhere in the national government and at the state level as well.
Today the process of gathering news reporters want is similar. Peter Baker, who covered the White House for the Washington Post and now is at the New York Times, described the current practice of getting valuable White House information for an original story. "You almost never get information directly from the White House, not anything useful," he commented (Baker 2005). Baker said he did not get "original stories out of the White House that everybody else isn't chasing." His solution for getting the information he looked for took much the same path as Price's: talk to people outside of the White House that speak with the president and his staff.
William Price had a more difficult White House to cover than reporters do today because presidents did not speak publicly so frequently as they do now and presidents held sessions with reporters on an off-the-record basis. White House staff spoke on an off-the-record or background basis, which meant they were not publicly quoted in news stories. Both presidents and staff decided themselves what the quotation rules would be. Today, the president speaks regularly to groups large and small in a variety of settings, most of which are open for press coverage. In addition, the tacit understandings governing the current relationship between reporters and officials recognize the need for some senior White House staff to respond to reporters' queries. Many of the sessions with staff are on-the-record responses, including the press secretary's two daily briefings with reporters.
At the same time, reporters at the White House face a substantial publicity operation seeking to persuade, cajole, and schmooze reporters into viewing information, and its importance, the chief executive's way. With a sophisticated communications operation drawing on resources across the federal government, the White House is in a strong position to direct stories about the president in terms of the information officials hold. The president and his staff have the facts and certain details not held by others. They want to see news organizations write stories in a light most favorable to the president and his initiatives and leave out altogether or tread lightly on information that does not reflect favorably on the chief executive. Faced with a White House phalanx controlling the flow of certain types of information, news organizations have their own ideas of what is a story and what it takes to dig out the information they want.
Although from the outside it might appear the White House holds the edge with news organizations in its efforts to determine what reporters cover and how they do so, from inside the White House getting the coverage you want is a source of continuing frustration. In late spring 2008 under the heading "Setting the Record Straight," the White House communications shop shot off a volley of e-mail messages to news organizations and talk radio producers and hosts criticizing the New York Times for its coverage of the president's economic performance and for a variety of its editorials (Stolberg 2008; White House 2008, April 3). The White House also singled out NBC for criticism for its editing of an interview Iraq correspondent Richard Engel had with President George W. Bush for the network's evening news program. Moreover, while he was at it, White House counselor Ed Gillespie chastised NBC for the White House coverage on its sister cable network, MSNBC (White House 2008).
Days later, Press Secretary Dana Perino issued a statement criticizing the New York Times for an editorial on Bush's "lack of support for veterans."
Once again, the New York Times Editorial Board does not let the facts get in the way of expressing its vitriolic opinions--no matter how misleading they may be. In today's editorial, 'Mr. Bush and the GI Bill', the New York Times irresponsibly distorts President Bush's strong commitment to strengthening and expanding support for America's service members and their families. This editorial could not be farther from the truth about the president's record of leadership on this issue. (Perino 2008)
Unable to get the coverage they wanted from news organizations, White House senior staff made public the frustration the president and his senior staff felt over their inability to dictate coverage of...
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