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The live briefings, held almost daily, do serve a purpose for both sides. They give the White House an everyday entree into the news cycle and let officials speak directly to the public. And they give reporters the chance to hold officials accountable and on the record (and help reporters get time on camera). [My emphasis]
Turns out a lot of the antics are posturing for the cameras:
"Reporters can be perfectly civil and launch good, hard-hitting questions" in private, he said, then in the briefing room two minutes later, "they turn into barbarians."
That image of reporters yelling at a press secretary and demanding answers to repeated questions works against them, said Donald A. Ritchie, author of "Reporting From Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps." They reinforce the public's negative view of them, he said, which in turn plays into the hands of the administration because now reporters, not the original subject that had them agitated, become the news.
There are two sides to the story, according to Seelye:
Commentators on the left say that the press is manipulated, and that it failed to challenge the administration enough after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the ramp-up to the Iraq war in March 2003. The right says the press is petty, irrelevant and politically biased against President Bush.
Why does the Bush Administration despise them? Perhaps it is because they are despicable.
Many reporters said they are mindful they are up against a White House that holds them in low regard. They point to a revealing article in The New Yorker from Jan. 19, 2004, in which Karl Rove, the president's closest adviser, told Ken Auletta, the author, that Mr. Bush saw the press as "elitist."
Mr. Auletta concluded that "perhaps for the first time," the White House had come to view reporters as special pleaders, as if they were just another interest group and one that was "not nearly as powerful as it once was."
Mr. McClellan, for one, said he wouldn't dream of trying to unplug the briefings.
"We have no intention of not broadcasting them," he said. "They serve a purpose for both the White House and reporters."
And when those purposes collide, a tight-lipped administration, adept at image management, can simply let the cameras do their work for them.
"We're one of the most reviled subsets of one of the most reviled professions," Dana Milbank, a Washington Post reporter who covered the White House during Mr. Bush's first term, said. "We're going to lose the battle every time."
Mr. Fleischer recalled a virulent period with the media (and Democrats) in May 2002 after a New York Post headline proclaimed that "Bush Knew" in advance about the Sept. 11 attacks.
"That was a vicious explosion that lasted a week," he said. "But the president calculated the press would go too far, and they went so far in their accusations that the country was far more inclined to believe the president than the press." Several polls at the time showed President Bush maintaining his high approval ratings of 75 percent throughout the episode.
"The public perceives the press not as watchdogs but as attack dogs," Mr. Fleischer said.
But Seelye admits, it isn't the White House's fault at all, it's the American People's fault. [Clinton WH Spokesman] Mr. McCurry saw the same dynamic.
"The public hates the people in that room," he said. "My standing up there and getting pelted with rotten tomatoes during Monica probably helped Bill Clinton because people say, 'What is wrong with the people in this room?' "
Scott McClellan just is the cat that licks the cream off his whiskers.
Mr. McClellan declined to discuss any podium strategy, saying simply, "I have great trust in the ability of the American people to see through these things and make the right judgments." Referring to the Cheney episode, he added: "The American people probably looked at this and felt like the press corps went a little over the top. It reached a point where people said, 'Enough already.' "
David Gregory, perhaps the nuttiest on-camera performer, blurted the truth, but then tried to back out of it.
"There is a desire by some, particularly on the right, to morph these situations into a different kind of debate — it's the vice president against an angry, left-wing, cynical, hate-filled press corps that wants to expose him as a liar," he said. "This is a false debate, stoked by a president and vice president who have made no bones about the fact that they don't have much respect for the press corps as an institution."
Neither do the American people, David.
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