About a year ago, I allotted five hours between a 9 a.m.-12 p.m. final exam and a 5 p.m. deadline to throw together the following 3,000-plus-word research paper. Just ran across it tonight and think it is timely with Obama’s whole Fox boycott (see my previous post: “Cloves and Catnip”). Even a poorly researched and badly written research paper shows that the media has been catnip to presidents for a long, long time.
Enjoy. And please forgive the typos and run-on sentences.
Collier, Kiah
December 12, 2008
J366E – History of Journalism
The Evolution of the Washington Press Corps
The opening line of Senate historian Donald Ritchie’s first book on the history of the Washington press corps says a lot about the contentious but often cozy relationship between the American press and executive branch of government – a complex and ever-evolving relationship that has often dictated the first draft of U.S. history:
“The day after the House of Representatives approved the First Amendment to the Constitution, protecting the freedom of the press, it debated barring reporters from the House floor.”
Richie goes on to describe how congressmen realized the power of the press and wanted coverage, but were afraid of being misrepresented or put in a bad light. Only a few reporters were initially granted a physical place in the House to report on the debates. The Republicans, who had minority representation in congress at the time, saw the press as a powerful tool to fight the Federalists and advocated for public sessions and decreased press restrictions.
The first Senate press gallery meant exclusively for legislative debate was constructed in 1794. The capitol’s first correspondents came to Washington at the beginning of the 19th century. The main focus of coverage shifted from the legislative to the executive branch of power and an “identifiable” press corps had formed in Washington by the Civil War. Ritchie describes the all-white, all-male , college-educated corps of the era as a group of “colorful, talented, opinionated, self-styled Bohemians…crusaders, lobbyists, poiticos, and novelists.”
In the 20th Century, the press corps evolved in size and became an “elite institution” – the fourth estate. Ritchie points out that as the press corps grew in size and gained influence, it became increasingly less popular with the public. Regardless of its efforts to thoroughly cover the federal government from the 1930s until the end of the Cold War, by the end of the century it had a lower approval rating than the government and public officials it covered.
The White House Correspondents Association was founded in 1914 by a group of eleven White House reporters when the Woodrow Wilson White House announced that it wanted to have regularly scheduled press conference but didn’t know which journalists to choose to attend them. The group of reporters formed the WHCA in protest after hearing a rumor, which suggested that the Congressional Standing Committee of Correspondents would make the decision. Its founding statement established that its “primary object shall be the promotion of the interests of those reporters and correspondents assigned to cover the White House.” After the rumor proved to be untrue, the association became inactive until the establishment of its infamous annual dinners in the 20s, which presidents and other government officials have attended each year since the presidency of Calvin Coolidge. George Condon, former president of the association, says on the association’s Web site the dinner was “at the heart” of what the association did until the 19990s when new technologies, access restrictions, and scrutiny of reporters combined to test reporters like never before. He says the association now focuses on “coverage-related issues affecting regular White House correspondents, including access to the president and efforts to reduces the costs that news organizations incur covering the president on the road.”
Many other historians and journalists acknowledge the recent challenges faced by the Washington press corps and the media in general, most recently with the post 9/11 atmosphere and the beginning of the War in Iraq. A May 2008 blog post by John Nichols of The Nation quotes CNN reporter Jessica Yellin, who worked for MSNBC before the invasion, as saying that the press corps faced pressure from corporate executives to make sure coverage matched the president’s high approval ratings and the post-9/11 “patriotic fervor.”
“(My) own experience at the White house was that the higher the president’s approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives–and I was not at this network at the time–but the more pressure I had from news executives to put on positive stories about the president,” Yellin said.
The post also quotes Scott McClellan, former White House press secretary under the Bush Administration, from his controversial memoir published after he left the White House. In the book, McClellan says the press corps didn’t live up to its “liberal” stereotype in its obsequious treatment of the Iraq War. “If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq,” says McClellan.
U.S. history is undeniably interwoven with journalism and what is generally referred to today as “the media.” The current state of the press corps is indeed not the first time in history it has been accused of being blase or even a “lapdog” of the administration. H.L. Mencken’s description of the Washington Press Corps of the 1920s is not so far off of how some might describe the modern press corps: ”A few months of association with the gaudy magnificoes of the town, and they pick up its meretricious values and are unable to distinguish men of sense and dignity from mountebanks,” Mencken wrote of the press corps in Washington, which he accused of being aligned with conservative Republican presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. “A few clumsy overtures from the White House, and they are rattled and undone. They come in as newspaper men, trained to get the news and eager to get it; they end as tin-horn statesmen, full of dark secrets and unable to write the truth if they tried.”
Leo C. Rosten, a 20th century academic, sociologist and screenwriter who wrote an analysis of the press corps of the 1930s, describes the news stories of the Washington press corps, or “what the newspaperman tells” and “what he considers worth telling” as “the end products of a social heritage, a functional relationship to his superiors, and a psychological construct of desire, calculation, and inhibition.”
Rosten realized decades before the end of the century and the establishment of the 24-hour news cycle that there was a disconnect between the public and the media, embodied in the “romantic but anonymous” Washington press corps, a group of people responsible for what we know but who are alien and unknown to most of us. “It seems ironic that in a society which moves according to the mandate of public opinion, we have been more concerned with the talents of men who incarcerate animals in public pounds than with those of the men who have the license to disseminate information about the political order under which we live,” Rosten writes. Indeed, it seems almost contradictory that the public is so disconnected from the institution charged with keeping things in check and helping maintain a functioning democracy. It doesn’t seem like this can be helped, especially with the structure of something like the press corps, consisting of a group of reporters who live in the White House and on Capitol Hill – two places that are also often disconnected from the public. But, a combination of the nature of the public’s relationship with the media as an alien entity and the modern pressures the media is facing, such as unprecedented government secrecy and news management, declining circulation and profit, conglomeration and competition, suggests that the public’s unprecedented disillusionment with the press corps makes sense.
The power of the press has been recognized and used since the founding of the United States. The press, due to its ability to reach a mass audience and generate certain sentiments, played a significant role in how our country came to split from Britain. It has been intertwined with government and politics from the beginning and has at times throughout its history, been too friendly with its subjects. But recently, what has come to be known as “the media” has come under fire and criticism like at no other time in U.S. history. While it is still our primary source of knowledge and information, you hear all the time that the media can’t be trusted anymore. This seems far-fetched, but it is true that the media has failed in recent years to stand up to government secrecy and pursue the facts regardless of the consequences. As long-time press corps member Helen Thomas puts it, the media has become a lapdog rather than a watchdog: “In the end, it is public opinion that rewards or punishes, and journalism has received considerable criticism in the last few years as lacking in trust, responsibility and accountability.” (p. 9)
Thomas attributes the modern day “compliant, complicit, and gullible” media to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, which she says caused reporters to fear being called unpatriotic. In her book, “Watchdogs of Democracy? A Waning Washington Press Corp and How it has Failed the Public,” Thomas is particularly critical of what she calls “the most secretive administration in modern history,” calling the Bush administration’s spokespeople “robots parroting the party line” and “Orwellian.” An examination of the evolving modern relationship between the government and the press especially concerning the government’s control and management of news coverage, as well as the effects of the 24-hour news cycle and media conglomeration, reveals the reason why the press has come to be a limp, distrusted noodle.
Ritchie and Rosten both suggest that the modern Washington press corps began in the 1930s with the expansion of the powers of the federal government during and after the Great Depression. Because of powerful figures like Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Ritchie says “the presidency grew so central to the federal government and Washington reporting that not even the lesser personalities of Warren Harding or Calvin Coolidge could diminish it.” Washington journalism became politicized (to the left) by the depression and conflicts of view with the government regarding the Bonus Riots during FDR’s presidency (1933 to 1945). The number of journalists covering Washington doubled during this time. Ritchie says that “reporters came to expect the federal government to take the lead in rebuilding the national economy.” The public began to expect coverage of the New Deal, which “reactivated” several Washington bureaus. This is also when newspapers began publishing bylines with stories for the first time, a practice that served as a compromise for salary increases. This was the beginning of name recognition and enabled journalists to build national rapport and local reputations. This, along with the shift in focus of coverage to the presidency that paralleled the increasing power of the federal government and the move of the press to the left after the controversial Bonus Riots and the depression, produced the modern Washington press corps. It is safe to say that every president since FDR (and maybe before) has tried to manage and affect news coverage and has, at times, had spats with the Washington correspondents. Some presidents have hated the press corps more than others and some have been better propagandists and “news managers” than others. Many say the Bush presidency has taken news management, as well as government secrecy, to a whole new level. The press corps has both succeeded and failed in the ups and downs of presidential news management. Often times in its failure, the press corps correspondents have been criticized for being merely stenographers.
The press corps came under severe scrutiny after the Watergate scandal, which led to the President Nixon’s resignation and shook Washington unlike any other story has since. Many newspapers and media outlets, especially The New York Times, wondered why they had not at least caught on to the story before young Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had it in the bag. But the entity responsible for coverage of the president, the press corps, was especially suspect. Ritchie quotes Bill Moyers, press secretary for President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who criticized the press for being “sheep with short attention spans” or stenographers who failed to ask real questions and dig deeper.
Thomas, who has been a member of the press corps since John F. Kennedy took office in 1961, says that the concept and accusation of news management was first articulated by members of the press corps during the JFK administration and that an examination of the administrations she has covered may show how presidential news management came to be what it is under the Bush administration. Thomas asserts that news management and accessibility ultimately affects the patterns in the press corps’ coverage. Thomas says that timing-related news management, which involves the strategic timing of the release of press statements and organization of news conferences, was first exercised by JFK, and was “especially prevalent” under LBJ, Reagan and George W. Bush. “It seems that each successive administration is more and more willing to manage the news because during the 1980s the press defaulted on its responsibility by letting the Reagan administration decide what actually was news.”
In 1961, more than 1,200 reporters had White House reporting credentials but, as noted by JFK’s Press Secretary Pierre Salinger, there were only about 60 prominent reporters who made up the elite pack. JFK made many changes in regards to the White House’s relationship with the media in order to control news coverage. JFK required that all administration speeches be cleared by him and with regards to important or “sensitive” pieces of news, demanded that all inquires from the press be directed to the White House. Although he wasn’t the first administration to give this reasoning, JFK tried to stop the publication of particular information by saying it was a matter of “national security.” This has been something the press and even the public has heard a lot under the Bush-2 administration.
Thomas says the practice of news management has expanded with each administration since JFK. She describes LBJ as being constantly paranoid the press was “plotting against him” and that he attempted to ban reporters from traveling with him on Air Force One. He also had his press secretaries and assistants call journalists and publishers to complain about negative stories. “Lyndon Johnson disliked having the press analyze and classify him,” says well-known New York Times Reporter and American journalist James Restone. “An obsessive consumer of newspaper, Johnson was easily irritated by what he read. He wanted to see the facts as he stated them, and he hated speculation of any kind.”
Nixon, who contributed his successful vice presidential nomination to a radio broadcaster that was a personal friend, was so good at controlling media access during his campaign that no journalist was able to ask him what his plan for the Vietnam War was until he was president and the press corps found out it was “Vietnamization.” His news management only became more intense. Thomas notes that toward the end of his first term while on the campaign trail, the White House physically prevented a television crew from shooting demonstrators protesting against the Vietnam War during the campaign. Nixon also went so far as to wiretap the phones of suspect reporters and had members of his administration lead anti-media campaigns. Out of fear that his Germany accent wouldn’t go over well with the public, the Nixon administration didn’t allow Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to speak at televised press conferences until the end of Nixon’s first term. Watergate was one of the most flagrant examples of news management until the more orchestrated instances like the Valerie Plame scandal of the Bush Administration. Just before his resignation during the Watergate scandal, Nixon didn’t hold news conferences for several months and virtually cut himself off to the press corps. This led to a serious degeneration of the press corps’ relationship with the White House.
Thomas says that Gerald Ford recognized this when he took office and attempted to establish an “openness” with the public and the press. But, Ford’s first press secretary Jerry terHorst ended up resigning after Ford first told him he would not pardon Nixon, but then issued a full pardon several weeks later. “He became a hero to reporters for his integrity,” Thomas says of terhorst.
Jimmy Carter’s relationship with the press characterizes his legacy in history as an intelligent and good person who would have been a phenomenal president if the timing had been better. Thomas says Carter had difficulty in his relations with the press corps because of his status as an “outsider” and although he didn’t intend to manage the news at first, caved under the pressure of the energy and Iranian hostage crisis. During the hostage situation, Thomas says she remembers the television media as being “relentless in citing how many days it had been that the hostages were being held, fueling the perception that Carter was a weak president. In truth, he brought the hostages back alive.” And of course, Reagan “got the credit” because the hostages were released on Reagan’s inauguration day.
According to Thomas and Ritchie, Reagan was highly skilled at managing the news. His administration worked especially hard to control certain televised images and to get certain ones for certain news stories each day. During the invasion of Grenada in 1983, the White House prevented all media coverage and gave its own tapings of the event to television networks.
Like his father, George W. Bush liked the media but wasn’t ever as comfortable at answering their questions. But certainly, his administration did not like the media and failed to give the press corps, or anyone, the time of day. This assertion is what Thomas describes as an unprecedented case of news management, combined with secrecy and manipulation. Beginning with his first election, then 9/11, the invasion of Iraq and the Valerie Plame scandal, the Bush administration has been what Thomas calls “the most secretive” administration in U.S. presidential history. It seems the press corps under the Bush Administraiton has been as much in the dark as it was during the five weeks during the Watergate investigation that Nixon refused to speak to the media.
The Valerie Plame scandal, which led to the indictment of I. Lewis Scooter Libby on chargers of perjury and obstruction of justice, is one of the most flagrant examples of what many see as an intentional news leak and manipulation of the media. The case, which sparked huge debates on leaks and anonymous sources, began when journalist Robert Novak published an article in July 2003 revealing the identity of then undercover CIA operative, Valerie Plame, whose husband, U.S. Diplomat Joseph Wilson, had been particularly critical of the U.S.’s invasion of Iraq. A January 2007 Boston Globe article discusses the revelation in witness testimony during the Libby trail of the sorts of news management tactics that had been used: “No one served up spicier morsels than Cathie Martin, Vice President Dick Cheney’s former top press assistant. Martin described the craft of media manipulation — under oath and in blunter terms than politicians like to hear in public. Most of the techniques were candidly described: the uses of leaks and exclusives, when to hide in anonymity, which news medium was seen as more susceptible to control, and what timing was most propitious,” the article reads. “Even the rating of certain journalists as friends to favor and critics to shun — a faint echo of the enemies list drawn up in Richard Nixon’s White House more than 30 years ago.”
Both leftists and conservatives, as seen in Scott McClellan’s memoir expose, have acknowledged that modern presidential administrations have attempted to mislead the Washington press corps and undermine its ability to serve as a watchdog. Thomas says that “to say that the relations between any president and a free press are complex and difficult is to say the obvious.” But in criticizing the coverage of the press corps, the public forgets that it is a part of an ever evolving, complex history just as the presidential administrations that come and go, affecting news coverage through their policies and tactics of news management.
Works Cited
Condon, George. “History of the WHCA.” White House Correspondents’ Association. 15 Nov. 2008 .
McClellan, Scott. What Happened: Inside the Bush White House and Washington’s Culture of Deception. New York: PublicAffairs, 2008. 1-50.
Nichols, John. “When the Free Press Fails Democracy.” The Nation. 30 May 2008. 15 Nov. 2008 .
Ritchie, Donald A. Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Vii-228.
Ritchie, Donald A. Reporting From Washington: The History of the Washington Press Corps. New York: Oxford UP, 2005. X-301.
Rosten, Leo C. The Washington Correspondents. New York: Arno P, 1974. Ix-52.
Thomas, Helen. Watchdogs of Democracy? The Waning Washington Press Corps and How it has Failed the Public. New York: Scribner, 2006. Ix-75.
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