The press as a special interest group, etc

“In the tank for Obama?”
White House press experts say to expect something more like “trying to get acquainted with Obama” when the new president takes power.
Saturday night at the Nieman Foundation convocation I’ve been covering at Harvard, “On Point” host Tom Ashbrook led a panel discussion about the press and the new Barack Obama administration. Heaven for news nerds.
Politico.com reporter Jeanne Cummings predicts the Obama campaign set the tone for a presidency that will have a markedly different relationship with the White House press corps than did President Bush.
Candidate George W. Bush got to know campaign correspondents and stroked their egos by giving them nicknames and cracking jokes about them, making them feel like insiders even while telling them he never read their work. When Bush then occupied the White House, those same campaign veterans joined the White House press corps, where he called on them by name and continued to create a cliquish camaraderie. That’s the age-old template, in which leaders reward and punish reporters with access and ego-stroking.
But this year’s campaign press pool saw very little of candidate Obama, she said. He didn’t cruise the aisles of the press plane, make nicknames or otherwise stroke the press. And he may not need to stroke scribes the way Bush did.
Cummings predicted the press will feel circumvented in new ways. President Obama can continue to use his massive email network of campaign volunteers and supporters to break news, using text messaging and email to go around traditional media outlets to deliver his message on his own terms and to stroke and reward his supporters, making them - instead of reporters - feel like insiders.
That’s a traditional step, with only a technological twist, said political historian Ellen Fitzpatrick of the University of New Hampshire. “My audience is the nation,” she quoted Roosevelt. Famous for his use of radio fireside chats, he was a frequent critic of the narrow interest of newspapers in local issues instead of the nation’s problems.
All this speculation about who is in and who is out is the entire problem with the White House press pool, fumed McClatchy Washington Bureau Chief John Walcott, who sniffed at the “cult of access” calling it a “solipsistic game.”
Walcott famously led a team of reporters who did not follow Judith Miller and the New York Times over the cliff in falsely reporting on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction that turned out not to exist.
Rather than cozying up to famous (and famously political) top aides, the McClatchy team looked for sources with on-the-ground knowledge and as a result, produced the stories that, he says, served ordinary Americans. He urged reporters not to give a damn if the White House likes them or not and to pay more attention to the interests of readers.
Former newspaper editor and State House spokesman Hodding Carter III made the same point, noting that major stories like the Iran-Contra arms-for-drugs scandal was broken by the Knight-Ridder Miami newspaper and not by White House reporters who are expected to have superior sources.
Note to media panel sponsors: Always get Ashbrook. Just the way he does on his radio show, he maintains a friendly puppy-dog tone while peppering people with intellectual buckshot, questions in batches of three to five, by which he keeps them on point.