Monday, June 05, 2006

THE MARKUP

Bumiller Signs Off   [Stephen Spruiell]

Elisabeth Bumiller is leaving the NYT's White House beat. Her column yesterday addressed some "misperceptions about the beat." Among them:

The White House doesn't care about the press.

This White House, like all White Houses, is obsessed with the press. What's in the newspapers and on the morning shows is always a big topic at the 7:30 a.m. senior staff meeting. And that's before all the other huddles specifically devoted to communications, including one in the Oval Office, usually around 9 a.m., with Mr. Bush.

Laura Bush once excoriated me during an interview for something I had written in the last paragraph of a story that you needed a St. Bernard to find in the paper. Scott McClellan, the former press secretary, was after me every day for a week to get my editors to correct a factual error. The mild-mannered Mr. McClellan was acting like a terrier because one of his superiors was on his case.

More recently, Karl Rove, the president's top political adviser, got so mad about an article that he told me he was putting my e-mail address in his spam filter.

I know the feeling. I had to put Bumiller in my spam filter after one too many e-mails asking for my bank details to deposit my $850,000 lottery prize.

Bumiller also opines on the "real ideology" of the White House press corps:

White House reporters are ideological.

Most reporters I know are not passionately political, left or right. Our real ideology is a love of conflict, meaning that we have a bias for stories about, yes, personality feuds, but also about disputes over policy. In the White House, as in conversations over the backyard fence, what goes wrong is news.

What a horrible bias to have if your job is informing the public about what its government is doing. Media critics have devoted countless words to how "he said, she said" journalism often results in the public learning little more than the spin of both sides, with scant attention paid to the actual substance of the policy in question. Especially in this case, the advantage goes to the side that's spinning against the White House, because as Bumiller writes, she often "worked the phones in concentric circles inward, from members of Congress who were mad at the president, to put-upon State Department officials, to those ubiquitous 'Republicans close to the White House.'" In other words, the administration's opponents in Congress often drove the story selection, with its supporters playing defense.

06/05 11:05 AMShare