President Bush’s new press secretary, who is expected to be named as early as this week, will inherit a briefing room brimming with resentment toward a stubbornly secretive administration.
“It’s the mushroom principle,” said John Roberts, who was a White House correspondent for CBS before recently moving to CNN. “Keep them in the dark and feed them manure.”
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan has rarely ventured beyond his circumscribed talking points when briefing reporters, who are deeply frustrated by the dearth of information.
“The problem is not Scott,” Washington Post columnist David Broder said on NBC. “The problem is George W. Bush, who has no sense of any obligation to keep the press informed or to keep the public current on what is going on there. And as long as that’s his attitude, it’s going to be very difficult for anybody to succeed in that job.”
His comments were echoed by Dee Dee Myers, who served as White House press secretary for President Clinton.
“The relationship between the press corps and this White House press operation is so contentious and so fraught that it’s very hard to imagine how anybody can really succeed,” she told Tim Russert on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” “The White House spokesman isn’t that forthcoming.”
Los Angeles Times columnist Ron Brownstein said the Bush administration has concluded that cooperating with the mainstream media is not necessarily “the most effective way to reach its voters.”
“It seem more focused on targeted, niche kind of vehicles of communication that reach their conservative base,” he said. “Talking to the mass media through that White House press briefing, or through any other vehicle, isn’t really the core of their communication strategy.
“And increasingly, it’s reaching people directly on their side through things like the Internet, talk radio and some of the more overtly partisan news sources,” he added. “That is a real shift that may outlast this president.”
It also amounts to a missed opportunity, said Tony Blankley, who was once press secretary for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
“It is a mistake of a White House press operation not to engage the press corps,” said Blankley, the editor of the Washington Times editorial page. “It can be done effectively and honestly and in a serious way.
“You’re going to get hit a lot, but to put up the shield and have no communication is going to induce future administrations to get into the same kind of mess,” he said.
David Georgian, a former aide to both Republican and Democratic presidents, said reporters are frustrated with the Bush press operation.
“That frustration, I think, has led to fairly negative coverage,” he told a television interviewer. “It’s colored the coverage of the president during this period of mishaps over the last several months.”
