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The White House is working hard to secure deals that yield fluffy, feel good commentary about the Obama White House. One American White House reporter used colorful terms to describe the arrangement. The reporter said, “They want ‘blow jobs’ first [in the press sense]. Then you have to be on good behavior for a bit or be willing to deal, and then you get access.”
The point he’s making really concerns White House reporters writing access-dependent insider books. But really, isn’t the more salient focus the effect of access on daily/hourly/constant journalism? It’s always the little compromises you make that are the most damaging, because they routinize you for compromise, until it gets to the point that you end up like a dog that’s been beat too much/ ’til you spend half your life just covering up.
Put it another way: can you really blame the White House communications team for wanting the blowjobs up front? They know they can get them. If there wasn’t a market for access, the comm staff could never set the prices. This is about demand. If you set up a journalistic system that focused on structural interactions as an explanatory force for politics and policy, then the sort of soap-opera-y insider pieces that depend on access would diminish — I’m not naive enough to think they’d disappear, but they’d diminish — and accordingly the marketplace for access compromises would shift in a manner more conducive to journalistic integrity.
Alternatively, the irrelevance of the White House press corps might hasten that day. The communications tools available to a White House staff to get its message out have compounded exponentially over the past decade, as everyone knows. Since the White House press corps performs more stenography than criticism and is largely dependent on being fed from the podium, then perhaps the day will come when more people would rather get, say, the president’s big speech on Whatever from an iPhone app than from a talking head. That would in turn force the White House press corps to ask itself how it adds value in that news-environment, and perhaps the answer would be “By performing thorough and penetrating journalism.”
(There is of course pageantry out at the agencies’ press corps, but not quite like the kind seized upon by the White House press folks.)
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glad you responded to clemons this way. your response was roughly the same as mine. it’s a market and it has always been thus…
one thing i’d add is that the insider-y information generated by the Luce piece is cool, but it’s not likely to have any actual informational value for anyone. power dynamics within the white house are fun for palace-intrigue reasons, but i’m really not clear on how that would impact policy outcomes other than by potentially displacing staff through controversy. that can have a value all its own, if it drives out actual misfeasance. but i can’t identify when that’s happened in this admin.
further down this same vein, gaining valuable insights into the white house doesn’t require interviews about personnel dynamics. in fact, that shit is stupid. every last piece that’s been written about volcker v. summers v. geithner has been retarded in the extreme, in large part because extraordinarily valuable bits of information, information that would determine the trajectory of the pieces, is stuff that will literally never see the light of day. until someone can actually get inside and figure out the precise nexus of influence between rahm, dodd, volcker, summers, et al., we just won’t know why the policies are coming out the way they are. that’s a series of interactions a luce-like financial policy reporter will never have access to, and why would they? this involves phone calls and personal chats, the significance of which is barely even cognizable to those involved, much less a reporter sniffing their panties for clues.
white house access becomes even more of a mirage when you’re talking about foreign and national security policy. those guys don’t have any important conversations outside of secure rooms. what makes a reporter think the information he gets that’s not in those secure rooms has any bearing on reality or the decisions being made? to the extent the significance of their work is a fiction reporters maintain, it seems like a dangerous delusion if it keeps them from doing the more important legwork, investigation, and analyses that might lead us to better understand, say, our policy towards iran. if we just stop at figuring out the relative strengths of donilon v. mcdonough, might this lead readers to think this is all they need to know, because it’s all they think they can get, about the policies these guys are directing?
Excellent observations, Mr. Ackerman.
I wish reporters would write meatier news stories and fight harder to get them out in real time rather than write books. With a few notable exceptions, the White house news corps sat next to Jeff Gannon/Guckert without batting an eye…where was the expose then when the story was in their midst?
You hit my exact thought on this issue, Palli. We can discuss Clemons’ supposed media-cuddling by the Obama White House once he’s dealt with Jeff/Gannon/James/Guckert and the deeply suspicious ‘relationship’ he had with the Bush White House. Think Clemons will go there? Not likely. Think any of the supine White House press corpse will? Less chance.