"The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and others in years," Politico argues. “These are the reporters who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.” This is a debatable point. The major media aren’t at the head of the line anymore, but this is hardly news. (For it’s part, National Journal had a sitdown with the president in the fall of 2010 when it relaunched.)
It’s not that bad when the press misses out on a golf game, but it was when the Obama White House let Chinese media into a presidential meeting with the Chinese premier and didn't invite the White House press corps.
Unfortunately, like AARP or the NRA, the White House Correspondents Association, of which I’m a member, feels obliged to take an absolutist line between becoming agitated by a modest trespass and a more serious one. Get rolled on Tiger Woods and pretty soon there are fewer interviews and what not. Stomp your feet over something modest before it gets out of hand. I get it.
As for the other complaints, hey, grow up. One of the beefs with the White House is that they’re producing lots of content for media outlets — especially photos that can be run in newspapers. As my former colleague Brooks Kraft, a Time photographer, notes, “White House handout photos used to be reserved for historically important events — 9/11, or deliberations about war. I don’t blame the White House for doing it, because networks and newspapers use them. So the White House has built its own content.” But for Politico to cite this as master manipulation seems overwrought. If the press corps doesn’t spring for an AP photo, that’s not the White House’s fault.
Look, in a perfect world the president would hold more press conferences and have more availabilities. As anyone who’s worked in government, as I have, can tell you, these moments, while often resisted by public officials and their communications staff, can help hone a president or a candidate, getting them more up to speed on a bunch of issues.
The greater threat from the Obama administration isn’t the usual playing of head games with the White House press corps; it’s the aggressive prosecution of both the people who leak government information and the reporters who receive it. I have some skin in the game on this too, having been involved in the CIA leak case that began 10 years ago when I wrote about how the White House was waging a war on Joe Wilson. The aggressive prosecution of leaks and the invocation of once-dormant statutes to go after leakers and reporters threatens to shut down real and vital sources of information, such as the Bush administration's massive domestic surveillance program that took place outside the courts set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or the use of torture in the war against terrorism. Ask reporters, such as James Risen of the New York Times, who have been in the legal crosshairs for their role in reporting on intelligence issues. Those are the things we really need to know. The president’s golf score? Oh, please.
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