End the White House Press Briefing!
❧ It's an unholy charade.

July 22, 2013
By Reid Cherlin

It is an accepted fact in Washington that the Obama administration and the press corps that covers it—once considered essentially two units of the same team—are now bitter enemies. After four years of smoldering disenchantment, reporters have seized on the government’s rapacious subpoenas of media records and L’Affaire Snowden as the excuse they needed to break into open rebellion. A primary arena for the skirmishing is the daily White House press briefing, where the ritual evasions by the administration’s mouthpiece, long a staple of the undertaking, are now received by his questioners with a contempt rivaling that of the Bush years. National Journal’s Ron Fournier, a D.C. eminence and former Associated Press (AP) chief White House correspondent, recently proposed a kind of retaliatory collective action: “If WH journos boycotted briefings for week,” he tweeted, “would 1) readers / viewers miss news? 2) the WH get the message?” As someone who spent two years in the White House press office helping the press secretary prepare for these exercises in silliness, I humbly submit that a boycott would fall short of what’s needed. The daily briefing has become a worthless chore for reporters, an embarrassing nuisance to administration staff, and a source of added friction between the two camps. It’s time to do the humane, obvious thing and get rid of it altogether.

Would there be a great deal of wailing about this? Yes, there would be. The daily briefing is seen as one of the last toeholds from which the press corps can try to keep the White House accountable, so eliminating it would be seen as Nixonian, even Stalinist, depending on one’s bogeyman of choice. But reporters who’ve actually endured the sessions day in and day out, if not quite ready to endorse abolition, concede that the institution has wildly outlived its utility. “Everybody thinks it’s so great, because it’s a chance to grill people and put them on the spot,” Jennifer Loven, another former chief White House correspondent for the AP, told me. “And that’s all great in theory, except that it doesn’t happen that way. Nobody really gets put on the spot. What you get in the briefing is a reply, not an answer.” Adds Peter Baker of The New York Times: “The White House decided a long time ago that it’s not about candor; it’s about deflection and survival. The press decided it’s about preening.” When I called up Fournier, he needed little prompting to expound on the problems. “It really has become useless,” he said. “We are now pawns in a reality show. I’d rather spend that hour and a half taking someone to coffee or calling or e-mailing someone to get a better sense of something important—you know, doing my job as a reporter.”

Read on at The New Republic ➝