American Political Science Association / White House Historical Association
Woman’s National Democratic Club, Washington, D.C.
October 9, 2003


Moderator:

Martha Joynt Kumar, Professor, Dept. of Political Science, Towson University


Panelists:

Dan Bartlett, Assistant to the President and White House Communications Director
Mike McCurry, Former Press Secretary to President Clinton
Bill Plante, White House Correspondent, CBS News
Alexis Simendinger, White House Correspondent, National Journal


Kumar: . . . Our panelists represent the best of both sides in the relationship between the White House and the press. We have two White House practitioners in the art of communications and two White House correspondents who cover the President and also the White House in a thorough manner and who both have the perspectives of several administrations and all of our panelists were chosen because they were so very good at what it is they do. . . .

. . . I’d like to begin with some quotations from the first transcribed press conference and this is a press conference of Woodrow Wilson . . . He was the first President to hold regularly scheduled open access and equal access press conferences with reporters. His first session was not transcribed but his second one in which he talked to reporters about what he would like from them is one that could be very contemporary in its feel . . . And I’ll just read you part of it. Wilson said and this is March 22nd 1913, Wilson said, and this is March 22nd 1913:

“I feel that a large part of the success of public affairs depends on the newspapermen, not so much on the editorial writers because we can live down what they say, as upon the news writers because the news is the atmosphere of public affairs. Unless you get the right setting to the affairs, disperse the right impression, things go wrong . . .”

Bartlett: It’s stunning to hear that because it’s conversations that we have in the White House to this day and it’s something that we spend a lot of time thinking about, is how best for the public to have a keen understanding of what the President is thinking at any given time, what his ideas are, what his policies are and how he wants to promote those policies to the public. . . . it is a two-way street, we need the press and the press needs us and we both understand that. I think there is a deep level of respect for the two institutions. The challenge for the White House, I think, particularly for the modern day White House is the nature of the news cycle and how the news cycle has changed dramatically, particularly in the last decade. . . . it’s literally a news cycle that goes from hour to hour with the Internet, with cable news. . . . It makes it difficult to find the most effective way to communicate to the public in a consistent way . . . On the other hand, the challenge of the White House Press Corp is to find and report the news on any given day. Now sometimes those two things are consistent. What we’re trying to communicate to the public and what they’re trying to report as news. Sometimes they are inconsistent and that’s when we have to find the happy middle ground . . .

McCurry: . . .You start with the proposition that this relationship on both sides has a co-equal goals. The press on its part believes its mission is to seek truth, report accurately, inform the public and hold those in power accountable. In theory any White House wants the press to do exactly that, to report fairly and accurately because they believe if the right information about the program is presented to the public, surely the public will see the political wisdom or the benefit of the argument and will be agreeable to the course of action. But that’s of course not the way the relationship unfolds. The big difference now in addition to all the things about technology and the pace of the news cycle and the accelerated nature of the news that Dan correctly points out, the other big difference is of course the culture of that relationship. It has changed so dramatically since the time of President Wilson. . . .

Kumar: Bill, you and Alexis, from the press point of view, what do you think of the type of partnership that Wilson envisioned for the press with government?

Plante: I think that most presidents, if not all presidents, since Wilson have shared the notion that they could enlist the media to advance their agenda. I suspect that the reporters to whom Wilson was talking almost one hundred years ago were far more invested in the process because they at the time were the sole representatives of the press, the sole transmission belt to the media. . . . But if all presidents come hoping to establish the kind of relationship which will allow them to project their agenda, they are all disappointed. . . . The relationship is adversarial, it remains adversarial but it is the president himself, and one day herself, who’s most responsible for the image which the President creates. It isn’t the press. . . .

Kumar: . . . if you look at [the relationship] there’s certainly tensions on the surface but there [are] also cooperative aspects to it. The White House does give out news that the reporters ultimately want, the reporters may have to work at it to get the information out. How do you all see the relationship? If you have to characterize it, how would you characterize it?

Simendinger: I think that there is always, regardless of which party or which administration, as some of the folks have already said, there is always the friction between the desire on the part of the White House to control what it is that we as journalists are going to produce and they certainly want it, regardless of party, regardless of president, to conform to their idea of what displays their message in the best light and what it is we are being asked to do . . .

Plante: The key element here is that, as the title of this symposium has it, we are competitors. We do not exist to cheerlead for the President and the White House is often not generally pleased with the way we cover the President, which makes their cooperation with us difficult at best. . . .