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| VOA Online Discussion: U.S. Media Coverage of the President
| Guest: Scott Stearns, VOA White House Correspondent & Expert Panel
Date: 18 June 08
Moderator: Erin Brummett |
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Erin: Welcome to T2A chat for June 18th. We’re discussing how the U.S. media covers the President as a former White House Press Secretary prepares to testify before Congress. We’re looking at the history of the institutional nature of this relationship and whether the media covers the President in a fair and unbiased manner. Here to answer your questions are VOA White House Correspondent Scott Stearns, political scientist Martha Kumar, and Mike Allen, who is political editor of the website politico.com Let’s get started with a question from India:
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Anil, India (email): I am an India based freelance journalist watching CNN and other U.S. media on a regular basis and I think that print media is more fair than electronic media because The Washington Post and The New York Times often seem to publish fair stories about the U.S. President. However, U.S. media also seems to favor the U.S. national interests of the White House, especially on foreign policy issues like Iraq and Iran, which are linked to oil policy.
Martha: Print media has a great deal more space than does electronic media. For tv evening news, they have around 20 minutes of news space and for a newspaper, they have many pages and sections so they can take several different angles on any particular story whereas for tv, they cannot do that...they can on cable but will focus on issues and stories that are visual, whereas for print media, they will look at a variety of kinds of issues.
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Erin: Explain the basic structure of the White House communications apparatus? How does the White House communicate with the media?
Martha: Since the Nixon administration the communications system has been a bifurcated system where you have a persuasion operation that you can see with the office of communications which does long-term planning and an information operation which the press office represents. What the press office gives out is supposed to be accurate information delivered on a timely basis and in response to reporters' queries. Those are the two basic parts of a White House communications operation.
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Michael: The way the United States media covers its political leaders and its head of state is very much different than the way it is done in most countries of the world, give some examples.
Scott: I have covered other Presidents in other countries, but as a regional correspondent where you only occasionally brush up against the information apparatus as opposed to the White House where I've been working for 7 years, so it's difficult to compare. Kenya has a presidential press service which disseminates everything that president says on a daily basis which is sometimes useful as a reporter, if you're not at state house in that case. I also have found in other countries it's useful to have a state run newspaper which we don't have in the U.S. If you can't get someone on the phone to give official comment, then I've felt free to quote with attribution state run newspaper. It's good we don't have this in the U.S. but it puts more pressure on the White House to have good and open lines of communications with the reporters who cover this head of state on a daily basis.
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Michael: Having a free press always there, is that a healthy situation that provides unbiased information out to the public or does it put too much focus on “spin”?
Mike: The danger would be if people reacted to total freedom by being irresponsible or tawdry. But the market helps control that, because if you put out a reckless product, people don't trust it and you lose your audience and advertisers, so a free press is very precious and our responsibility is to use it in a way that people who don't have it would dream of being able to use it.
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Erin: How would you describe media/press coverage by traditional journalists and that done by (quote mark) citizen (quote mark) journalists who publish mostly on BLOGS.
Mike: The citizen journalists can be a lot more interesting and often know things that people locked up in glass buildings do not. So traditional journalists must be sure that they're tapping into the sensibilities and experiences of their readers and viewers, who are - or could be - citizen journalists. If our news products aren't relevant and exciting, the citizen journalists will replace us - as well they should. So we have to show that through our standards of accuracy and fairness, we offer something necessary and desirable that people can't get from citizen journalists who don't have the same institutional requirements or responsibilities. Either way, citizen journalists add great spice to the news stew.
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Erin: Is it the role of a free press to aggressively cover government or is there a better and more civil way of providing the public the right to know what its government is doing.
Mike: A free press plays a huge role in putting people who understand and influence their government. Our leaders can help with that through transparency and technology - through such methods as putting documents online, opening meetings to web cameras and making leaders available to journalists and other citizens. But as the traditional media, we play a big role in helping people sort through and navigate that information. If the information is just out there with no one looking at it, it's not much good. The easiest way in the world for an agency to hide something is to post the whole document on the web and not tell anyone it's there because they could say tat they put it out, but that doesn't mean it's any use to the citizens. So the free press acts as a pair of eyeglasses to help people see through the information that's available to them.
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Martha: It is also the responsibility of the press to bring to the public what news organizations consider to be news, not just what the white house or other government institutions want to provide. So for example the Washington Post did a series of pieces about the treatment of vets at a Washington hospital, Walter Reed, which was not something the government was talking about but once the post published its pieces, the government had to respond as to why the vets were receiving the type of coverage they were.
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Erin: Discuss some potential conflicts faced by White House communications staff - such as the public desire for transparency and the needs of national security. How has the Bush administration dealt with such conflicts? How would you like such conflicts to be dealt with in the future?
Mike: The Bush Administration - for reasons of both phi8losophy and practicality - has time and again come down on the side of tight control of government information. People - and that includes reporters, believe or not - support overwhelmingly support that if it's being used in a way that will keep the country safer. But control of information can also be used to shield our leaders from accountability. So a free press keeps has quite rightly kept pushing the Bush Administration to surrender more material - and in some cases has even successfully gone to court to force the release of email and other documents the Administration did not voluntarily release.
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Martha: I agree with Mike and think the public expects when a government speaks it does so truthfully and the information they are provided is accurate - that when it turns out it is not, no matter whether it's a national security issue or a domestic issue, it can give them trouble. An example would be the president's 2003 state of the union address in which he referred to the efforts of Saddam Hussein to acquire yellowcake uranium from Niger, a claim that was inaccurate. The White House tried not to deal with the issue but it came up a lot and became a bad story for them for weeks and no matter whether they regarded it as a national security issue or not they ended up having to deal with it and admit the claim was not accurate
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Scott: It's not just national security but executive privilege. The White House has still not released the identities of individuals who met with the vice president 7 years ago as part of his energy task force. Reporters are not asking for a transcript of that meeting, just to know the identities of the people who met with the vice president. The white house says that would interfere with the president's and vice president's ability to get impartial information if people know that when they come to the white house, their identity might at some point be released.
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Erin: Describe the more personal aspects of the relations between the Press Secretary and the Press Corps. These people spend a lot of time together, but are often at odds. Does this make for a collegial or combative atmosphere? How do friendships and rivalries shape the nature of the proceedings?
Martha: the relationship is basically a cooperative one because it's based on need. The president and his staff need reporters in order to get their messages to the public and news organizations need the president because that's central to the concept of news that is shared by their readers and viewers. So you find that in a briefing setting like the televised daily briefing, it may appear as if reporters and the press secretary are continually doing combat, but in reality the relationship is cooperative because the white house, in order to get it's message out, has to understand the needs of reporters and their news organizations and provide information in a way that responds to their needs.
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Erin: Is it wrong of us to have expectations that other countries should provide their news media with the same rights and responsibilities that we have here in the United States. To what extent does the character of a White House communications apparatus reflect the character of its president?
Scott: You are free to have whatever expectations you want but I don't imagine in many countries that you'll ever get the level of access and transparency that you have here at the white house. I can only imagine how difficult it is for reporters in Harare today to report on President Mugabe, given the level of intimidation that's become part of daily life in Zimbabwe. Those expectations may never be met but I suppose there's nothing wrong in hoping that non-transparent societies might gradually become more transparent.
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Erin: To what extent does the character of a White House communications apparatus reflect the character of its president?
Martha: White Houses generally reflect their Presidents, the strengths and weaknesses. Ronald Reagan for example was very good at communicating his personality, his style of leadership and his positions and goals. And his organization reflected that. He had a very strong communications operation that dealt with long range planning as well as a good daily operation. In the case of George H. W. Bush, he was not interested in communications and his organization reflected it. He did not have a long range planning operation for significant parts of his presidency and instead he relied on his press secretary who was very good to handle the daily operations. so he didn't like to think in the long term but rather on communications and vision, instead go with the daily.
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Martha: In a democratic society the public depends on the press to inform citizens of what officials are doing and not doing, not just what the government wants them to know - that in order to vote for their officials, people need to have real knowledge of what the government is doing and it's the press they depend upon to provide them with that information so the press really makes the system work.
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Scott: It's true that as a beat reporter at the white house, the president sets the agenda. But it's up to us to decide what we say about it. Today (June 18th) the President wanted to talk about offshore drilling. You could have just written a story about the president says there's need to drill for oil offshore. That's only half the job. You'll see in VOA's coverage today that we have comments from both Rahm Emmanuel and the Chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee saying that the president's assertion that drilling for more oil offshore will reduce gas prices, is false. That's the whole job.
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Erin: That wraps T2A chat on media coverage of the U.S. President with VOA White House Correspondent Scott Stearns, political scientist Martha Kumar, and Mike Allen, who is political editor of the website politico.com Our thanks to Scott, Martha and Mike – and to you for joining us. We hope you’ll come back on Wednesday, June 25th at 1800 utc when we learn about micro-lending and Kiva, the world's first person-to-person micro-lending website. Kiva.org empowers individuals to lend directly to unique entrepreneurs in the developing world. We meet Kiva CEO and Co-Founder, Matt Flannery. He established Kiva in 2005 with a mission to help alleviate poverty. That’s Wednesday, June 25th at 1800 utc on voanews.com See you then! |
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