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One of the enduring story lines of Barack Obama’s presidency, dating back to the earliest days of his candidacy, is that the press loves him.
“Most of you covered me. All of you voted for me,” Obama joked last year at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner.
But even then, only four months into his presidency, the joke fell flat. Now, a year later, with another correspondents’ dinner Saturday night likely to generate the familiar criticism of the press’s cozy relationship with power, the reality is even more at odds with the public perception.
Obama and the media actually have a surprisingly hostile relationship — as contentious on a day-to-day basis as any between press and president in the past decade, reporters who cover the White House say.
Reporters say the White House is thin-skinned, controlling, eager to go over their heads and stingy with even basic information. All White Houses try to control the message. But this White House has pledged to be more open than its predecessors, and reporters feel it doesn’t live up to that pledge in several key areas:
— Day-to-day interaction with Obama is almost nonexistent, and he talks to the press corps far less often than Bill Clinton or even George W. Bush did. Clinton took questions nearly every weekday, on average. Obama barely does it once a week.
— The ferocity of pushback is intense. A routine press query can draw a string of vitriolic e-mails. A negative story can draw a profane high-decibel phone call or worse. Some reporters feel like they’ve been frozen out after crossing the White House.
— Except toward a few reporters, press secretary Robert Gibbs can be distant and difficult to reach — even though his job is to be one of the main conduits from president to press. “It’s an odd White House where it’s easier to get the White House chief of staff on the phone than the White House press secretary,” one top reporter said.
— And at the very moment many reporters feel shut out, one paper — The New York Times — enjoys a favoritism from Obama and his staff that makes competitors fume, with gift-wrapped scoops and loads of presidential face time.
“They seem to want to close the book on the highly secretive years of the Bush administration. However, in their relationship with the press, I think they’re doing what they think succeeded in helping Obama get elected,” said the New Yorker’s George Packer.
“I don’t think they need to be nice to reporters, but the White House seems to imagine that releasing information is like a tap that can be turned on and off at their whim,” Packer said.
Much of the criticism is off-the record, both out of fear of retaliation and from worry about appearing whiny. But those views were voiced by a cross-section of the television, newspaper and magazine journalists who cover the White House.
“These are people who came in with every reporter giving them the benefit of the doubt,” said another reporter who regularly covers the White House. “They’ve lost all that goodwill.”
And this attitude, many believe, starts with the man at the top. Obama rarely lets a chance go by to make a critical or sarcastic comment about the press, its superficiality or its short-term mentality. He also hasn’t done a full-blown news conference for 10 months. Obama's White House aides can rightfully say they've set new standards for opening up access on several fronts, such as releasing previously secret visitors' logs, expanding White House web content and offering more than 150 sit-down interviews with Obama to selected reporters.
But Gibbs is unapologetic about sometimes taking a hard line in his dealings with the press, saying it’s a response to the viral nature of modern media.
“There’s a danger in letting something go. Trust me, I read a lot of news every day. Not a day goes by that something that I didn’t pay enough attention to, or close attention to, doesn’t go from being myth to reality over the course of several hours,” Gibbs told POLITICO.
“I understand if you’re a reporter and get 95 percent right, and your word choice isn’t right on 5 percent. But that 5 percent goes on to become reality. I’ve got to live with that, when it may or may not be true,” Gibbs said. “It does make our jobs difficult.”
The correspondents association recently met with Gibbs to discuss, in the words of Bloomberg's Ed Chen, "a level of anger, which is wide and deep, among members over White House practices and attitude toward the press.”
A few days later, Gibbs said at one of his briefings, “This is the most transparent administration in the history of our country.”
Peals of laughter broke out in the briefing room.
The press’s bill of particulars boils down to this:
Dodging questions
If you cover City Hall, you talk to the mayor. If you cover the Yankees, you’ll hang around Derek Jeter’s locker. The White House is no different, and aides past routinely filled that need by letting the press pool toss the president a couple of questions every so often, usually at one of the various events that fill his calendar every day.
Not Obama. He has severely cut back the informal exchanges with the press pool, marking a new low in presidential access.
The numbers speak for themselves: during his first year in office, President Bill Clinton did 252 such Q&A sessions—an average of one every weekday. Bush did 147. Obama did 46, according to Towson University Professor Martha Kumar.
“Too many of the president’s meetings are ‘no coverage’ for my taste,” said ABC’s Ann Compton. “That is a stark reduction in access for us.”
White House aides say Obama has hardly avoided the media. Indeed, he has done so many interviews that at times journalists have accused him of being overexposed. In his first year, Obama gave 161 interviews, according to Kumar’s tally. Bush and Clinton each did about 50.
Reporters point out that the Bush White House was no paragon of press transparency. And since the meeting with Gibbs this month, Obama took a couple of questions at a meeting with congressional leaders last week and still photographers got into a couple more events.
“I give credit to Robert for having the meeting, hearing our concerns and taking some action after the meeting to show that, while he may not agree to all the things we’re pushing for, he respects our concerns,” said CNN’s Ed Henry, the correspondents’ association’s secretary. Playing favorites
It’s one thing to feed a scoop to the Times. Every White House does it.
But Team Obama did it right in front of the other reporters’ faces – then, in their view, lied about it.
It was last September in Pittsburgh, when about 20 journalists were attending an off-the-record dinner with Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel during the G-20 summit. Also in attendance: New York Times Chief Washington Correspondent David Sanger, a White House favorite.
As one White House reporter tells it, "Jim Jones and Denis McDonough and Gary Samore were lurking in this very dark, nice dining room that we were in. And we were all kind of wondering why they were there. Then, at one point at the dinner, McDonough tapped on Sanger's shoulder and whispered something in his ear. Sanger got up and walked towards this clutch of NSC people, including Jones, and they walked off."
"We were all flummoxed and floored by this whole thing," said the reporter. "A few reporters cornered McDonough and said, 'You can't do that. You can't do that in front of other reporters.' He said, 'Oh you guys, you're barking up the wrong tree! We didn't give anything. You've got nothing to worry about.'”
But later that night, Sanger posted a blockbuster scoop: as Obama, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and French President Nicolas Sarkozy would announce the next morning, the Iranians had a secret nuclear site – but kept it hidden for years from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The other reporters – Sanger’s dinner companions earlier in the night -- were sent scrambling at around midnight to match the Times’ account.
“I don’t have a great recollection of the timing of all those events...It was obviously at the end of a long week” of meetings, McDonough told POLITICO. “I probably didn’t have dinner with anyone that night.”
Sanger doesn’t dispute that the White House confirmed the Iran story, but he had earlier written about suspicions of such a site in his book ‘Inheritance’ and he says he put ‘urgent’ questions to officials earlier that day after learning that Iran had abruptly disclosed a new site in a letter to the IAEA.
“It's clearly the case that they're playing favorites,” said Bloomberg’s Chen, when asked about the White House’s relationship to the Times. "It's kind of par for the course. Some people understand that -- none of us really like it -- but that's the way the administration does business."
Gibbs denied an “unnecessary advantage” to the Times, while saying it has far more reporters covering topics of interest to the White House than most outlets. Times Deputy Washington Bureau Chief Dick Stevenson said it would be “absurd” to suggest the Times doesn’t get access in certain instances that others don’t.
But Stevenson said, “Like every other journalist in Washington I would say there’s a lot more they could do in terms of access for us and everyone else. While we appreciate the instances in which they cooperate and are accessible, there are plenty of cases where they’re not terribly accessible or responsive.”
While the Obama administration’s decision to stiff-arm Fox News caused a huge dust-up for a time last year, his back-benching of the Wall Street Journal has barely generated a peep. The Journal’s White House reporter, Jonathan Weisman, occasionally vents his frustration over the near freeze-out that has left the Journal with a single exclusive interview since Obama took office. “The Times got the POTUS interview, but we got the story first,” he tweeted this month after Obama granted the Times an interview about the Nuclear Posture Review. After Obama agreed last week to another interview with John Harwood, who works for CNBC and the Times, Weisman tweeted: “Sheesh, how many times have you read that? Not that I’m bitter or anything.”
“Jonathan talks to many people, many senior advisers here. He talks to Rahm and [David] Axelrod fairly repeatedly. There may be a little of Mark Twain in this. The mention of his not having access is greatly exaggerated,” said Gibbs, who also noted that Jerry Seib, the Journal’s Executive Washington Editor, has been in to talk to Obama, for an interview and as part of Obama’s off-the-record lunches.
Another event that riled many in the press corps took place on March 20. The Washington Examiner's Julie Mason confronted former Newsweek correspondent Richard Wolffe, author of a highly favorable book about the Obama campaign, when he attempted to join the White House pool on the Saturday before Congress' big health care vote.
"You're not in the pool," Mason recalled telling Wolffe. "You shouldn't be joining." Mason said Wolffe claimed that he was there courtesy of "a special invitation from the Obama administration." Wolffe is working on a second book on the Obama administration.
"Are you working for them officially now?" shot back Mason.
“The White House wants their friend to be in the pool and we don't know what recourse we have,” Mason later told POLITICO. “It's just completely unfair to the press corps and flies in the face of the concept of a free press."
Where’s Gibbs?
During Obama’s recent, brief trip to Prague, a message went out to one of the top reporters to assemble the handful of traveling reporters for a dinner with Gibbs and other top members of the president’s entourage. The journalists dutifully complied, picked out a restaurant, made a reservation and showed up at the appointed time.
When Gibbs and the others were late, it wasn’t too surprising. But soon several hours passed with no sign of the White House contingent. The food came and went.
Eventually, the press gave up and headed out on some late-night sightseeing. As they strolled the Charles Bridge, they ran into Gibbs who was doing the same. Asked about the dinner appointment, Gibbs said the White House group had simply decided to grab some pizza.
“We got pulled in about ten different directions,” Gibbs said this week. “Denis, for instance, never made it out of the hotel for dinner. He got pulled back in. By all accounts, and judging by having seen them later that night, they [the reporters] did not look the worse for wear.”
The press’s annoyance may strike some as a fit of childish pique over being stood up for a trivial social engagement. However, foreign trips with the president often cost tens of thousands of dollars per reporter, and the promise of some proximity to the president and his top aides is one of the few ways to sell a reluctant editor on the value of being there.
The difficulty tracking down Gibbs isn’t limited to the road. Even reporters for major newspapers say they have trouble getting their calls and e-mails returned. Journalists say that Gibbs seems to spend a lot of time with Obama but say it cuts down on his time to talk with them. “One thing we really want is a press secretary who has access,” said George E. Condon Jr. of Congress Daily, a longtime White House correspondent. “The tradeoff in that is because he’s sitting in meetings a lot, it does cut down on his ability to get back to us.”
“That door is always open,” Gibbs insists, but he acknowledges that he does devote a lot of time to policy confabs. “I went to ten three-hour Afghanistan sessions….The dominant question in that time period in the media and in society writ large was what are we going to do on Afghanistan. I made a decision that I was going to go to those meetings to have a sense of where the president was, where the other players were.”
One current focus of press corps ire are gauzy video features the White House’s staff videographer cranks out, taking advantage of behind-the-scenes access to Obama and his aides, such as a recent piece offering “exclusive footage” of First Lady Michelle Obama and Jill Biden touring Haiti.
“I think someone out there might mistake them for news, as opposed to slick publicity handouts for the White House,” said Compton. “To me, they’re mocking what we do.”
Getting mad
And just what happens when you upset the White House?
Among White House reporters, tales abound of an offhand criticism or passing claim low in an unremarkable story setting off an avalanche of hostile e-mail and voice mail messages.
“It’s not unusual to have shouting matches, or the email equivalent of that. It’s very, very aggressive behavior, taking issue with a thing you’ve written, an individual word, all sorts of things,” said one White House reporter.
“It’s a natural outgrowth of campaigning where control of the message is everything and where a very tight circle controls the flow of information,” the New Yorker’s Packer said. “I just think it is a mistake to transfer that model to governing. Governing is so much more complicated and is all about implementation—not just message.”
One of the most irritating practices of the Obama White House is when aides ignore inquiries or explicitly refuse to cooperate with an unwelcome story—only to come out with both guns blazing when it takes a skeptical view of their motives or success.
“You will give them ample opportunity on a story. They will then say, ‘We don’t have anything for you on this.’ Then, when you write an analytical graf that could be interpreted as implying a political motive by the White House, or something that makes them look like anything but geniuses, you will get a flurry of off the record angry e-mails after you publish,” one national reporter said. “That does no good. If you want to complain, engage!”
Gibbs said the White House’s efforts to push back tend to focus on fixing factual mistakes before they take hold in the media.
“The way we live these days, something that’s wrong can whip around and become part of the conventional wisdom in only a matter of moments and it’s hard to take it, put a top on it and put in back into the box,” Gibbs said. “That’s the nature by which the business operates right now.…This isn’t unique in terms of us and it’s likely to be more true for the next administration.” Asked about some of the more aggressive tactics, including complaints to editors, Gibbs said, “We have to do some of those things....I certainly believe anyone who goes to an editor does so because it’s something they feel is very egregious. I don’t think people do it very lightly.”
Some reporters say the pushback is so aggressive that it undermines the credibility of Obama’s aides. “The willingness to argue that credible information is untrue is at its core dishonest and unfortunately calls into question everything else the press office says,” one White House reporter said.
While some reporters note improvements since the Bush era, like more informed deputy press secretaries and assistants, others complain of rigid image control pervading the government. “The access is much poorer than the Bush administration,” one national newspaper who regularly covers the White House said. “This is wider than just the White House. I feel like the political appointees in a variety of agencies are more difficult to get to. There are people…you could reach in the Bush administration that now they say ‘That position does not speak to the press. We do not give background. We do not give anything.’ ’’
Compton said that if the Obama White House’s sense of being besieged by the press is authentic it bespeaks a kind of innocence born from a candidate and a president who have never confronted a full-on Washington feeding frenzy.
“They ain’t seen nothing yet,” the longtime ABC reporter said. “Wait ‘till they have to start really circling the wagons when someone in the administration under attack, wait ‘till there’s a scandal, wait ‘till someone screws up, then it’ll get hostile.”
Getting even
While complaining about stories is hardly unique to the Obama administration, White House reporters charge that sometimes, aides even retaliate against reporters who cross them.
One reporter said that after he wrote a story the White House viewed as critical, aides tried to cancel meetings he’d lined up with other administration officials. “I was told very clearly the press office tried to stop those appointments going ahead,” the journalist said.
Gibbs said he couldn’t recall any such instance. “I’m sure people may have thought that, though,” he said.
While the Times clearly enjoys more access than any other publication, its perceived transgressions often get a heated and sustained response from the White House. “There certainly is no lack of friction or the appropriate tension that goes into this relationship—to put it mildly,” Stevenson said.
Last year, Times reporter Helene Cooper was the target of a fusillade of complaints from Obama staffers and was for a time essentially frozen out by the administration, several colleagues said. Recently, a story by Sanger and Thom Shanker about an Iran policy memo from Defense Secretary Robert Gates received a public drubbing from Gibbs. Gibbs said he recalled complaints about a story Cooper wrote from Japan that “had a bent nobody else’s story had. The bent was also wrong.”
Cooper was matter of fact when asked about her run-ins with the White House. “We cover the White House. Sometimes they like what we do. Sometimes they don’t. That’s just the way it is,” she said, declining to elaborate.
Cooper’s editor, Stevenson, wouldn’t comment on her case, but acknowledged the White House has made life difficult for his team from time to time. “There are times when the relationship between a reporter and the rather-closed community in any West Wing and even in an administration more broadly becomes particularly fraught or tense. That has happened with us in a number of instances both public and private,” he said. “All of our reporters come to work the next day, do their jobs, make phone calls, do their best. In none of these cases, has any complaint from the White House or any criticism, publicly or privately, changed the way we staff anything, approach any stories, or in the least bit affected our coverage.”
Last year, colleagues noticed that David Corn of Mother Jones went through a noticeable dry spell at White House briefings, with Gibbs seeming to overlook his raised hand for a period of several weeks or more.
“I remember tangling with David, but I would just say I think David has probably gotten more questions at the briefing in the last few months than he got in the entire last eight years,” Gibbs said. Corn declined to comment.
“They throw some brush-back pitches every now and then,” one White House reporter for a major newspaper said. “They’ve been pretty heavy handed and have cut some people off.”
Edward Luce of the Financial Times drew the ire of Obama aides for a couple of articles arguing that decision making in the Obama administration is extremely centralized. Neither piece was a devastating indictment of the White House, but they prompted a furious reaction.
“I was just in awe of the pummeling Ed took from top White House people,” said policy blogger and New America Foundation senior fellow Steve Clemons. He began talking to White House reporters and came away convinced that what he calls an “extremely unhealthy” relationship has developed in which the White House generally cooperates only with reporters who are willing to write source-greasers or other fawning articles.
Gibbs referred questions about the Luce stories to McDonough. “Who’s Ed Luce?” McDonough said. “I’m not familiar with that.”
Clemons’s post on his findings, “Communications Corruption at the White House,” was harsh, particularly coming from a policy wonk who tends to agree with most of Obama’s stances.
“Has the bar moved so far that a reasonable piece that gives and takes a little but provides both criticism and applause, that is something White House has to respond to in such a prickly, thin-skinned way?” asked Clemons.
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