“You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
Every administration tries its best to play the press and work the media refs, so I am not surprised to find out that the Obama Administration is doing the same. But the Team of Hope and Change is certainly engaging in activities that ought to give pause to anyone who genuinely believes in Hope and Change:
President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House.
Not for the reason that conservatives suspect: namely, that a liberal press willingly and eagerly allows itself to get manipulated. Instead, the mastery mostly flows from a White House that has taken old tricks for shaping coverage (staged leaks, friendly interviews) and put them on steroids using new ones (social media, content creation, precision targeting). And it’s an equal opportunity strategy: Media across the ideological spectrum are left scrambling for access.
The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House — fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press — has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.
“The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press,” said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, “The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it’s really tough to do business with people who don’t see the need to be cooperative.”
[…]
Obama boasted Thursday during a Google+ Hangout from the White House: “This is the most transparent administration in history.” The people who cover him day to day see it very differently.
“The way the president’s availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace,” said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. “The president’s day-to-day policy development — on immigration, on guns — is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren’t even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away.”
[…]
Conservatives assume a cozy relationship between this White House and the reporters who cover it. Wrong. Many reporters find Obama himself strangely fearful of talking with them and often aloof and cocky when he does. They find his staff needlessly stingy with information and thin-skinned about any tough coverage. He gets more-favorable-than-not coverage because many staffers are fearful of talking to reporters, even anonymously, and some reporters inevitably worry access or the chance of a presidential interview will decrease if they get in the face of this White House.
*The super-safe, softball interview is an Obama specialty. The kid glove interview of Obama and outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by Steve Kroft of CBS’s “60 Minutes” is simply the latest in a long line of these. Obama gives frequent interviews (an astonishing 674 in his first term, compared with 217 for President George W. Bush, according to statistics compiled by Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University), but they are often with network anchors or local TV stations, and rarely with the reporters who cover the White House day to day.[…]
* There is the iron-fisted control of access to White House information and officials. Top officials recently discouraged Cabinet secretaries from talking about sequestration. And even top officials privately gripe about the muzzle put on them by the White House.
* They are also masters of scrutiny avoidance. The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and others in years. These are the reporters who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.
To be fair, if White House reporters didn’t complain about the lack of access that they had to any president, they would find themselves far less busy. Still, it is worth noting that the Most Transparent Administration in History is anything but. And it is also worth noting that a host of people who would condemn this kind of behavior in a Republican administration are busy trying to excuse this president from the standards to which they would have held President Mitt Romney.
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Comments:
Feb '12
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
“This is the most transparent administration in history.” Well I'll be a benign Benghazi peace activist.. I mean Obama would have to be fast and furious with the truth. Sol Sanders who just happens to be in Israel at the moment wrote this about Benghazi... Today I'm ashamed to be an American journalist
May '10
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
"He gets more-favorable-than-not coverage because [...] some reporters inevitably worry access or the chance of a presidential interview will decrease if they get in the face of this White House."
That's a little like the CNN guys who, after the overthrow of Saddam, admitted that they had for years refrained from reporting on his atrocities for fear he would throw them out of the country.
We can expect the tough breaking news of 2009-2016 to hit the presses in 2017.
Jan '11
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
The White House won't let the press see what Obama's doing?
No wonder. He isn't doing anything. That's what they don't want revealed.
Aug '10
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
Lies , damned lies, and where are the statistics ?
Oct '10
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
"President Barack Obama is a master at limiting, shaping and manipulating media coverage of himself and his White House."
Jim and Mike must be on drugs. The quote above could only be true if the media were victims of his "mastery." But they're not. They're willing accomplices, mere stenographers for the Democrat Party, its wholly-owned subsidiary. He is a master of nothing, a mere beneficiary of the corrupt, unethical, immoral, venal media.
Mar '11
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
Pejman Yousefzadeh:
Sycophancy gets old after a while.
Pejman Yousefzadeh:
There was tough coverage? And I missed it? Somebody point it out. I bet he'd give an interview to the Chicago Tribune's Christi "I've never seen you lose" Parsons if she asked.
One of the reasons W didn't give as many interviews is because they tended to devolve into a pop-quiz on "who is the premier of Whogivesastan."
Feb '12
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
Thank you for this excellent analysis. You explained several things which I have not understood until now. I don't see things getting better over the next four years.
Jul '10
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
A month into his second term and the Poodle Press & Stenographic Pool finally gets around to revealing how they are "manipulated" so that the "news" is pretty much what the White House says it is. I wonder what caused this rupture -- it's sure to be temporary -- between these power centers that up to now have worked hand-in-glove and shoulder to shoulder to advance the progressive program. The JournoList scandal showed even the most naive how things really work behind the scene. You may be sure that it still operates under another name with improved security.
Aug '12
Re: “You’ll Report What We Want You to Report”
If what Pejman is writing is true, then it is more damning than any complain conservatives have made about the media. The media justify their existence as "speaking truth to power". If that is what they really did they would be falling all over themselves to drag this administration into the light. Instead they complain about not having their stories written for them by administration staffers.