Death of the White House Press Corps

[babylonsister]

Awww. :nopity:

Death of the White House Press Corps
by Lloyd Grove


With a Twitter-savvy president and their own ailing media companies, Lloyd Grove finds the boys in the briefing room more depressed than ever.

Is the White House press corps teetering (possibly tweeting) on the brink of obsolescence?

That is, are Twitter, Facebook and YouTube—to say nothing of slick video vignettes and candid shots of a triumphantly appealing President Obama on WhiteHouse.gov—poised to supplant the often-skeptical journalistic stylings of CBS, CNN, and The New York Times?

It’s an inexcusably heretical thought, especially to the wizened veterans who occupy the coveted reserved seating in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, just off the West Wing, during presidential spokesman Robert Gibbs’ daily Q&As.

Members of the press corps who wish to cover the president’s trip to Prague this week will have to make their own way by flying commercial. ;)

“We’ve been on the brink of that longer than just this presidency,” said CBS senior White House correspondent Bill Plante, who has been covering the beat since Ronald Reagan's term. “When I came here in 1981, Mike Deaver made no secret of the fact that he wanted to reach out beyond us to the public, by having events where the president would be presented to the public unfiltered—and that has been the goal of every White House since.”

For as long as there has been a White House, a healthy tension has existed between the president, who seeks to convince the citizenry with calibrated messages and images, and the middlemen of the Fourth Estate, who traditionally convey, interpret, rebut, deride, and otherwise filter those messages and images. Every so often, the president takes his revenge, as Obama did on Friday, mocking skeptical reporters who have been questioning the positive impact of health-care reform. "Can you imagine if some of these reporters were working on a farm and you planted some seeds and they came out next day and they looked—Nothing’s happened! There’s no crop! We’re gonna starve! Oh, no! It’s a disaster!" Obama told a town meeting in Maine. “It’s been a week, folks. So before we find out if people like health-care reform, we should wait to see what happens when we actually put it into place. Just a thought.”

more...

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-04-03/death-of-the-white-house-press-corps/full/

[Kdillard]

1. Hopefully it is painful.

[flpoljunkie]

2. Speaking of 'death'--I found this excerpt in NYT article on the death of CNN rather laughable

People at CNN see themselves as victims of a polarized political culture — and to some extent, they are. But high-minded self-pity only gets you so far. At a media event in Washington recently, I watched a CNN producer try to persuade a gaggle of skeptical right-wing journalists that the network’s hosts really are objective. (“You’d be surprised how some of them vote!”) Even if they were, it wouldn’t matter. The disinterested anchorman pose worked when TV news ran for 30 minutes every night at 6 p.m. It doesn’t work across hours and hours of prime time, with Campbell Brown blurring into John King blurring into Wolf Blitzzzzzz... .

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/05/opinion/05douthat.html?hp

[Jennicut]

6. CNN is bending over backward to get conservatives to love them and it will never work.

They are just succeeding in turning off liberals and middle of the roaders.
And they have some really boring personalities on there.
Rick Sanchez is goofy but at least he is somewhat interesting. That is about all I watch on CNN....until Wolfie Blitzer comes on.
I don't get MSNBC and sometimes I want to check out the news but it is very grating and frankly not worth my time. And now Christiane Amanpour is leaving so CNN is even more pathetic.

[Hekate]

9. Where is Christiane Amanpour going? She and Fareed Zakaria are the 2 bright lights among dimbulbs!

The only shows I watch on MSNBC are Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow. Sometimes Chris Matthews catches my eye, but not often. Weekends, with their prison fetish, are utter dreck.

Hekate

[Jennicut]

15. I am not sure of the exact date. And I do like Zakaria as well.

Two very thoughtful journalists though I disagreed with Zakaria on the Iraq War (he was for it in the beginning).

[Cosmocat]

13. I have given up on them ...

I won't watch Blitzer, they lost me with him after watching him lovingly call republicans "good conservative" half a dozen times each show during the early bushco years ...

I sent them a few e-mails telling them to ratchet it down or they would lose me, they have ...

I will tune in to Sanchez from time to time, but that is it ...

Their "brand" should be THE straight, go to news source, but you are right, it is SO painful seeing them trying to suck second teet to Faux ...

[lib2DaBone]

3. When they stopped being reporters and started being Stenographers..

.... they made themselves obsolete.

[thelordofhell]

10. They stopped being reporters and started thinking they were pundits

They better start reporting researched facts instead of out of their ass opinions or they will be totally obsolete.

[Clio the Leo]

4. They've been whining for weeks about the lack of a formal briefing....

... some give counts as to how many days it's been since that formal briefing last July ... you know the one ... where the President's ENTIRE message got lost in cop-gate. I'd submit that if the press weren't trying so hard to verbally trip the man up (and it's happened to all Presidents, that's just how things go) there'd be more formal briefings.

What makes their complaints so laughable is the President is now appearing on the network news programs at what seems to be now almost once a week. So it's not like he's REALLY side-stepping the press ... just the press pool.

[jaxx]

5. I had to go look up Jake Tappers comment....hagiography.

I think he called the President the messiah. :rofl:

[Bitwit1234]

7. What the hell good are they, the lie

and misrepresent to try to get the republican view of everything. When as they say, the internet and twitter give it to you straight.

[rocktivity]

8. This is the same press corps that spent the previous presidency

cheerfully accepting scripted questions, sitting on stories and not being allowed to take notes?

Just go back to telling the whole truth no matter who it hurts and you'll be fine.

Cue the DU "Cry Me A River" String Quartet!

:nopity::nopity::nopity::nopity:
rocktivity

[Supersedeas]

16. even when Bush insulted the Press Corp and lied to the Press Corp--they still cozied up to W

[thelordofhell]

11. It took these geniuses forever to expose Jeff Gannon

Y'know, the gay prostitute who thought he was a member of the press corps.

[old mark]

12. All to the good. Get rid of those hacks - they can go hang around George Bush where

they were very comfortable...see what HE has to say.


mark

[City Lights]

14. The White House Press Corpse is reaping what it has sown.

:nopity: