A revolutionized White House briefing should not be televised

These exchanges are best when the president is directly engaged. Think of President Franklin Roosevelt gathering reporters around his desk and holding court. Think of the times you’ve seen Presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Trump up, close, and personal with the media, no matter how unhappy they’ve professed to be with their coverage. They know its value.

There have been plenty of memorable moments over the years — Sam Donaldson sparring with President Ronald Reagan, President John F. Kennedy holding the first live televised press conference. But much of the day-to-day work of interacting with the media falls not to the president but to communications staffers, especially the White House press secretary.

The custom until the current administration was for the press secretary to conduct a formal “briefing” each day for the reporters assigned to covering the White House, though the administration seems to have pivoted back to holding regular dailies. The White House beat is a prestigious one in journalism, and news organizations assigned some of their best to the assignment. In the early 1990s, I was serving as spokesman at the State Department for Secretary of State Warren Christopher. Our practice was having our daily briefings on the record, available for broadcast, but not available for live broadcast coverage because, at the time, no one “went live with breaking news.” State Department briefings were rather sleepy affairs.

When I went to the White House in 1995 at the invitation of Clinton, with a strong-arm twist from his wife, the rules for the daily press briefing precluded broadcast coverage. On arrival, several reporters, especially Mark Knoller from CBS and Peter Maier from what was then Westinghouse, came to me and made a case that they needed access to the daily White House briefings for broadcast purposes.

Makes sense to me, I thought. So, we soon opened up the daily briefings for use by broadcast media. They needed the sound and the visuals for their reports. Mind you, there was no social media, no Twitter at the time, and when I began, only CNN was reporting live during the day, and poor Wolf Blitzer had a hard time making much of what I said at the daily briefings.

All went well until 1998. Then we had a sex scandal at the White House, and everyone wanted the details on the president and a young intern. Media organizations wanted to carry my briefings “live” every day. I remember calling the head of CNN at the time and complaining that they were promoting my upcoming daily briefing. “There is nothing new I will say today; I guarantee that.” But Tom Johnson, then the president of CNN, responded that I spiked their audience numbers every afternoon. I was apparently more entertaining than afternoon soap operas.

At this point, the daily televised briefing has devolved into spectacle, with both sides seemingly performing for the cameras and talking past each other to the viewers at home.

There is a moral to this story. The White House daily press briefing should not be a reality TV show. It is a “briefing.” Reporters should take in the information offered by the White House and then check it out. The public has a right to know, and the government has an obligation to tell. Those are fundamental principles.

But that can happen without the white hot lights of live television. I applaud the decisions of media organizations that now refrain from carrying White House briefings live. They need to get information, test it against other sources and experts, and present complete reports to a public that is hungry for accurate and truthful reporting. That should be a guiding goal for the next presidential administration.

Mike McCurry was White House press secretary from 1994 to 1998 under President Bill Clinton.