White House-press tension nothing new

One year after 9/11, the White House gave the only interview with President George W. Bush to CBS’ Scott Pelley, who knew the president from Texas.

It ignored major newspapers, notably The New York Times. In fact, Bush granted only rare interviews to the “paper of record,” which often criticized his policies, and none through most of his second term.

Now, a new president is selling health care reform. But when the White House offered Sunday interviews with Barack Obama, it excluded Fox News Sunday. The reason: Fox has spotlighted criticism of him and twice failed to air his prime-time appearances.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

The enormous attention to the historic nature and activist agenda of the first black president has spurred allegations of liberal media favoritism from Obama’s conservative critics. In the previous administration, the critics were liberals who said reporters were too uncritical of how Bush led the nation into war against Iraq.

For a White House to reward friendly correspondents and punish critics is hardly new.

Franklin Roosevelt told reporters asking critical questions to wear dunce caps and called them liars. John Kennedy canceled 22 subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune, charging bias. Richard Nixon had Vice President Spiro Agnew assail the networks and wiretapped journalists.

Today’s multiplicity of outlets gives a president more options. Though Obama didn’t appear on Fox, he was on five other networks, including Univision.

He has taken advantage of media receptivity to hold an unusually large number of news conferences and interviews. When some journalists warned of overexposure, polls disputed that.

More than some recent administrations, this White House has singled out organizations it believes favor Obama’s enemies.

“Fox often operates almost as either the research arm or the communications arm of the Republican Party,” Communications Director Anita Dunn told CNN’s “Reliable Sources.”

But the White House also refused to send a staffer to appear on CNN with the author of an “inside” book on Barack and Michelle Obama.

Meanwhile, despite generally friendly 2008 coverage, Obama has faced the same adversarial relationship most administrations have with their press corps (though that has not extended to Michelle Obama).

Even some openly pro-Obama columnists greeted his Nobel Peace Prize with words like “surprised” and “ridiculous.”

Contentious briefings

White House briefings are contentious, and daily coverage echoes the day’s partisan tone. Anti-Obama outbursts at health care town hall meetings dominated August coverage on CNN and MSNBC, as well as Fox. Three 24-hour news channels and the multiplicity of outlets have raised the decibel level.

Like others, the Obama White House has sought to control the news flow. Chief of staff Rahm Emanuel has held off-the-record dinners to woo columnists. Obama called on reporters from a liberal blog at news conferences.

Some regional reporters say they’ve noticed unusual receptivity to queries about the local impact of administration programs, but less cooperation when they raise other issues.

According to Politico.com, Washington Post reporter Shailagh Murray, a big baseball fan, received “a signed ball from President Obama, delivered by Ax (David Axelrod) and Rahm (Emanuel) as they joined her birthday celebration in Chinatown.”

Ultimately, four decades of watching this relationship convince me that positive or negative coverage has less influence than journalists and their critics think. Faced with an increasingly unmanageable torrent of information, more people stick with outlets with which they agree.

Despite incessant media efforts to rate Obama, the public verdict will take longer and hinge on what he does — or doesn’t do.

For Bush, the die was cast with his inept handling of Hurricane Katrina in his sixth year. For Obama, it may depend on his success in easing the extent and severity of the current recession.

X Leubsdorf is the former Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune.