Twitter blamed for blowing up White House, press relations

The website of 140-character shouts and screams this week took some of the blame for the troubled relations between the White House and the presidential press corps.

Once a more laid back relationship, President Obama’s spokesman and a former CNN White House correspondent said that Twitter has turned every journalist into a wire reporter, and snarky ones too.

“When I started at the White House, the White House didn’t have a tweet feed,” said Josh Earnest at a Harvard University Institute of Politics media roundtable discussion.

Coupled with the development of online news sites, he said, “That emphasis on speed and immediacy has increased the pressure and the competition among the White House press corps and certainly has made it more challenging for White House officials to engage in that kind of environment.”

Jessica Yellin, the former CNN ace now a fellow with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Journalism, said that evolving technology, from email to Twitter, has “radically” changed press relations.

Where once reporters would take all day to develop a story, they now flash out a breaking news alert. For example, she said, if she talked to Earnest, “He knew that if he told me something, then minute the words came out of his mouth, I could be tweeting it out and there was no taking it back. So that radically changed the amount that was shared with the press and the relationship.”

Twitter has also killed some traditions, like leisurely morning “gaggles,” when reporters used to huddle around the press secretary’s desk to get a feel for the day.

“There’s a lot of nostalgia among the current White House press corps for the days of the morning gaggle but it didn’t make any sense for any White House to agree to those morning gaggles anymore because it’s just a second briefing. People walk into a morning gaggle, they used to be a laid back affair where people were sipping coffee and listening to the press secretary. They now don’t have time to bring their coffee with them because they’ve got to have both thumbs free so they can tweet it,” he said.

“Once everybody else has a website to maintain, or blogs to maintain, all of a sudden everybody is a wire reporter and then once you have Twitter, everybody is reporting live up to the second,” he added.

Twitter has also changed political coverage, and even campaigns, as the focus has turned more to controversies and throw downs, said Earnest.

“Some of that is a function of the media environment that we operate in, right, that the colorful criticism with a colorful take down is the thing that gets attention, particularly if can be contained in 140 characters or less. And to ignore the connection between that phenomenon in our media and Donald Trump’s election as president of the United States, is to deny some very basic facts about the tone of the political debate in this country,” he said.

Earnest suggested a way to calm the angry political division in the nation, telling his audience of students and professors:

“We’re not going to persuade people by talking down to them, by saying they’re unsophisticated, or leading them with the impression that we think they’re stupid because they voted for Donald Trump.”

He added: “We need to find a way that we can find some common ground with people, even if they disagree with us and be able to make a case and start a dialogue that isn’t just rooted in, ‘I’m right and you’re wrong,’ and here are all the colorful ways that I can illustrate to you why you’re wrong. We need to change the way that this debate operates.”

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner’s “Washington Secrets” columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]