Jerking the Press Around
GLASS, ANDREW J.
Jerking the Press Around Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine By Howard Kurtz Free Press. 336 pp. $25.00. Who Speaks for the President?: The White House Press Secretary from...
...By the fifth year of the Clinton Presidency, this group had become fully resigned to being jerked around...
...Young reporters simply cannot believe what things were like when I began my career as a Washington-based correspondent...
...To be sure, McCurry thought he would be out the door by the time Kurtz' projected book appeared in print...
...Yet their detailed dissection, when revealed this spring in Spin Cycle, shocked few, if any, members of the White House press corps...
...By the time Reagan took office, his de facto press secretary, Larry Speakes, could, with full impunity, place a sign on his desk which read: "You don't tell us how to stage the news, and we don't tell you how to cover it...
...Instead, he sopped up voluminous quantities of often obscure public papers...
...They just know how to deal in the modern journalism world and they are good at getting their story out...
...Just about the best book ever published on the broad theme covered in Nelson's readable history is The Reporter's Trade (1958), written by Stewart and Joseph Alsop...
...But that belies his 40-year career as a stand-and-deliver reporter for the Associated Press, including a stint on the coveted White House beat...
...The late, legendary I. F. Stone rarely spoke with Presidential press secretaries and hardly ever went to the White House...
...The headlines will only linger for a very brief period unless you find a way to keep it in front of the American people for a longer period of time...
...He does append a valuable bibliography, however, consisting of nearly 200 books that deal with relations between the press and the President...
...Missing, unfortunately, are McCurry and his inept predecessor, Dee Dee Myers...
...Nelson also records the dates that he interviewed some of the players, mostly on the phone...
...In sharing some of their trade secrets, the Alsops stress that "newspaper reporting is not a profession, despite the complacent contrary belief of a good many reporters who have achieved the upperbrackets...
...These days, save for the elite, they feel they have won the lottery if they manage to snatch a few minutes of private time with Mike McCurry...
...In any case, neither Kurtz nor Nelson asked Fitzwater, a retired career bureaucrat who has always enjoyed amicable relations with the press, how he has come to regard his successor...
...Although Nelson did not interview McCurry, he quotes him as saying— somewhat astonishingly—to the New Yorker's Ken Auletta: "We basically don't let Presidents make announcements anymore...
...They recognize that with 24-hour news channels and the Internet, you can't wait for the next morning's newspaper anymore...
...But it is precisely substance that is lost in the incessant rounds of stroking, spinning, stonewalling, and smearing...
...But a weakened Clinton, for his part, could ill afford to upbraid McCurry...
...In the end, though, I suspect substance is judged on whether it's right or wrong, regardless of how effective the White House was in responding in the first instance...
...If they had, he would have told them, admiringly, that the Clinton shop is "stateof-the-art" in its dealing with the media...
...Curiously, it is one of the few relevant works that fails to appear in Nelson's otherwise prodigious bibliography...
...What they do," Fitzwater reflects, "is not that substantively different...
...So does the stolid Marlin Fitzwater, who got along well with two quite different bosses, Ronald Reagan and George Bush...
...It is, rather, "a craft or trade, like undertaking, which it somewhat resembles...
...With so much good stuff to be mined from the recent scandals and investigations, it is a pity that, for all practical purposes, Nelson ends his story before Clinton's re-election in 1996...
...Nevertheless, during those interviews he had been quite candid about how he went about polishing President Bill Clinton's image to a short list of reporters chosen for their journalistic heft...
...29.95...
...Reviewed by Andrew J. Glass Senior correspondent and columnist, Cox Newspapers Once Mike McCurry decided late last year to leave his job as White House press secretary, he sat down with Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media reporter, and let him in on a host of shop secrets...
...Frequently this enabled Stone to break big stories...
...John F. Kennedy, a figure nearly twice my age, was in the White House, yet I could walk backstage at will to interview all of JFK's top people with never a minder in tow...
...In those days, reporters tended to question press secretary Pierre Salinger about routine matters like the President's upcoming travel schedule...
...That put the Presidency in a more or less constant state of crisis...
...Fitzwater, for what it is worth, told me he has not read Nelson's book and does not have any recollection of being interviewed by him...
...The sly Jody Powell, who toiled to good effect for a largely ineffective Jimmy Carter, does show up...
...Still, until Richard M. Nixon named Ron Ziegler, a former Disneyland guide and Republican flack, as his press spokesman, most modern Presidents felt that their interests would be best served by hiring "professionals"—press secretaries who had worked as reporters and editors or, at the least, had worked closely with them...
...But of course they do, if merely by restricting access to primary news sources and incessantly seeking to shape "the story of the day...
...In recounting anecdote after anecdote (Cokie and Steve Roberts, for example, dining with Bill and Hillary Clinton at an upscale Chinese emporium), he filled Kurtz in on the techniques he used to limit the damage in the public's mind whenever his boss screwed up...
...The bibliography, plus the magazine articles Nelson cites and the list of unpublished manuscripts he has absorbed, lend his book, if not his prose, the aura of an academic tract...
...Winning good reviews, or trying to avoid bad ones, has become an end in itself rather than a means of shaping a public policy agenda...
...326 pp...
...Kurtz, in his Introduction, deftly covers the same ground in a page or two...
...It is essentially an account of the evolving role of the White House spokesperson from Grover Cleveland to Bill Clinton...
...As both Kurtz and Nelson make us realize, that kind of reporting is all but gone in an era of purposeful leaks that shower down from on high...
...Kurtz, meanwhile, hastily revised his Introduction so that it opens with the Lewinsky sex scandal, and he wrote a new Epilogue that amply chronicles McCurry's habitual evasions on the matter...
...There are few direct signposts to the Clintonesque manipulative trail in W. Dale Nelson's Who Speaks for the President...
...As a former fellow practitioner of these arts, Fitzwater sees little to distinguish what McCurry does for Clinton by way of press manipulation from what Jim Hagerty did for Dwight D. Eisenhower in hiding the severity of his heart attack, or what Steve Early did for Franklin D. Roosevelt in hiding his profound disability...
...With umbrella-topped camera stations sprouting on the White House lawn in a semipermanent bivouac, the press secretary realized his resignation would be widely viewed as a low blow...
...Other ways must therefore be found, such as advance briefings for a favorite few, to establish and maintain the all-important story line...
...Among insiders, the chief interest in these revelations lay in the brazen way McCurry had made them...
...Then, in January, along came the Monica Lewinsky affair, so to speak...
...Nearly all of those techniques can be classed as manipulative...
...Who Speaks for the President?: The White House Press Secretary from Cleveland to Clinton By W. Dale Nelson Syracuse...
Vol. 81 • June 1998 • No. 8
