Bush's Press Problem

Fascinating reading.

Posted 2004-01-13
This week in the magazine, Ken Auletta writes about the George W. Bush Administration’s relationship with the American press, and about how the President manages to keep reporters at a distance. Here, with The New Yorker’s Daniel Cappello, Auletta discusses how that relationship affects the public.

DANIEL CAPPELLO: All Presidents complain about the press. How is the Bush White House different?

KEN AULETTA: In two ways. They are more disciplined. They reject an assumption embraced by most reporters: that we are neutral and represent the public interest. Rather, they see the press as just another special interest. The discipline flows down from President Bush, who runs the White House like a C.E.O. and demands loyalty. This is a cohesive White House staff, dominated by people whose first loyalty is to Team Bush. When Bush leaves the White House, most of his aides will probably return to Texas. They are not Washington careerists, and thus they have less need to puff themselves up with the Washington press corps. In fact—and this leads to the second difference—from Bush on down, talking to the press off the record is generally frowned upon and equated with leaking, which is a deadly sin in the Bush White House (unless it is a leak manufactured to advance the President's agenda).

[Ed. Valerie Plame anyone?]

Members of the Bush Administration complain that the media are too liberal, and too biased. Do they have a point?

Sometimes. Although the press’s surveys of the Washington press corps are less scientific than many conservative critics proclaim they are, privately many White House reporters concede that they are probably somewhat more liberal than the majority of American voters. One often glimpses the bias in abortion stories, in which right-to-life proponents are sometimes portrayed as fanatics, while those who are pro-choice are portrayed as human-rights advocates. But these are rarely conscious biases. Most reporters, I think, strive to be fair. In fact, while White House officials think there is a liberal bias in the press, they don't believe this is terribly important. They describe the press as critical of every President, not just a conservative President.

[Ed. It's well documented that the higher a level of education a person has, the more likely they are to associate themselves with 'liberal' positions]

You write that George W. Bush is influenced by his mother, Barbara Bush, who has a famous distrust of the press—she never spoke off the record to reporters when she was First Lady. Does someone in such a position have an obligation to be available?

I believe they do have that obligation. In a nonparliamentary system such as ours, close questioning of the President is supposed to come from the press, usually in the form of press conferences. Yet Bush has held only eleven solo press conferences, fewer than almost any modern President. Over a comparable period, his father held seventy-one and Bill Clinton thirty-eight. The Bush White House claims that they have answered thousands of press questions, but the bulk of those answers come from the handful of questions allowed a couple of times a week after photo opportunities, and from joint press conferences, where the President gets only one-quarter the number of questions and few follow-up questions are permitted.

[Ed. "This is scripted?" -GWB March 6, 2003 see link below*]

New Yorker Online Exclusive - Go. Read. Learn.

Here's the CNN transcript from the, "this is scripted?" Press conference. Of course it has been scrubbed.

Pure bs, where there are no scripts. Ever. Obviously.