Americans discovered last spring that the Justice Department had wiretapped the office and home phones of Associated Press writers and editors during a national security investigation. The same department later named a journalist in court papers as a co-conspirator to a crime, essentially for just doing his job. More recently, the AP has accused the administration of using Freedom of Information Act requests as a way for President Obama’s political appointees to keep tabs on what journalists are investigating.
This week, the White House has committed another, though less serious, outrage. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi revealed that Obama’s staff has been effectively censoring pool reports written by members of the press.
The press pool is a cooperative arrangement through which journalists covering the White House share information about mostly routine and mundane events on the president’s schedule. A journalist assigned to write the pool report shares basic facts and quotes with his or her colleagues in standard reports that go out to everyone. This helps reporters keep tabs on what the president does without forcing all of them to gather mundane information separately about the same staged events — such as his 200th round of golf.
The White House benefits because it means there isn’t always a mob of reporters crowding Air Force One. Press secretaries aren’t forced to answer the same questions repeatedly, such as, for example, who was Obama’s playing partner this weekend and what was the commander in chief’s score?
Oddly, it is the White House press office that distributes the pool reports to journalists. This may not be a good idea because, Farhi reports, Obama’s minions have been unusually aggressive in trying to control the contents of those reports.
At one event in 2011, the Post’s David Nakamura was following Obama and writing the pool report during a presidential trip to Asia. Nakamura, reporting that the White House was limiting access to Obama’s photo-ops, then added “a comment juxtaposing a speech Obama had given two days earlier lauding freedom of the press.” Josh Earnest, who was then deputy press secretary, demanded that Nakamura remove the ironic comment before he would send it out to other reporters.
The White House suppressed the report of another pooler, McClatchy’s Anita Kumar, who had written last year on Obama’s taped appearance on The Tonight Show. Obama’s staff made her pare it down on the grounds that the White House (but not apparently Kumar) had agreed not to release many details about what happened on the show before it aired. This summer, Earnest backed down in another pool report dispute after trying to remove the fact that a White House intern had fainted at an event.
In each of these cases, the pool contents at issue are trivial. But attempted White House tampering with the reports is not trivial. There is no excuse, let alone justification, for this kind of interference with journalists’ work, especially not from a White House with a reputation for treating the press shabbily.
