\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span> The James S. Brady Press Briefing Room, in the West Wing, has seven rows of seven seats. The Associated Press, Reuters, and the biggest TV networks have reserved seats in the front row; blogs like Politico and Real Clear Politics are near the middle; BuzzFeed and the BBC are in the back. The seating chart is the purview of the White House Correspondents\u2019 Association, an independent board of journalists who, with the sombre secrecy of a papal conclave, assess news organizations according to factors such as regularity of coverage and centrality to the national discourse.<\/span>
<\/span> There are also correspondents who might be called floaters\u2014those who have White House credentials but no assigned seat. Some floaters work for outlets that are too new to have been included in the most recent seating chart; others work for outlets that are marginal or disreputable. When press briefings are half empty, floaters can find vacant seats. In the early days of the Trump Administration, when each day\u2019s briefing is oversubscribed, floaters pack the aisles, angling for a spot visible from the podium. The paradigmatic example of a floater is Raghubir Goyal, an amiable, somewhat absent-minded man in his sixties. Goyal claims to represent the India Globe, a newspaper that, as far as anyone can tell, is defunct. Nevertheless, he has attended briefings since the Carter Administration, and has asked so many questions about Indo-American relations that his name has become a verb. \u201cTo Goyal\u201d: to seek out a reporter who is likely to provide a friendly question, or a moment of comic relief. All press secretaries get cornered, and all have, on occasion, Goyaled their way out. But no one Goyals like Spicer.<\/span>
<\/span> Until recently, the more established White House correspondents have regarded floaters as a harmless distraction\u2014the equivalent of letting a batboy sit in the dugout. Now they are starting to see the floaters as an existential threat. \u201cIt\u2019s becoming a form of court-packing,\u201d one White House correspondent told me. Outlets that have become newly visible under the Trump Administration include One America News Network, which was founded in 2013 as a right-wing alternative to Fox News; LifeZette, a Web tabloid founded in 2015 by Laura Ingraham, the radio commentator and Trump ally; Townhall, a conservative blog started by the Heritage Foundation; the Daily Caller, co-founded in 2010 by Tucker Carlson, now a Fox News host; and the enormously popular and openly pro-Trump Breitbart News Network. Most of the White House correspondents from these outlets are younger than thirty. \u201cAt best, they don\u2019t know what they\u2019re doing,\u201d a radio correspondent told me. \u201cAt worst, you wonder whether someone is actually feeding them softball questions.\u201d He added, \u201cYou can\u2019t just have a parade of people asking, \u2018When and how do you plan to make America great again?\u2019 \u201d<\/span>
<\/span> For years, the first question of each press briefing has usually gone to the Associated Press, whose reporters sit in the middle of the front row. In Spicer\u2019s first briefing, on January 21st, which lasted five and a half minutes, he uttered several verifiable falsehoods\u2014\u201cThis was the largest audience to ever witness an Inauguration, period\u201d\u2014then left without taking any questions. For the first question of his second briefing, he called on the New York Post, whose reporter, sitting in the fifth row, was clearly surprised. He asked, \u201cWhen will you commence the building of the border wall?\u201d In Spicer\u2019s third briefing, his first question went to a reporter from LifeZette, who wondered why the Administration hadn\u2019t taken a harder line on immigration. Many of Spicer\u2019s early briefings were unusually short\u2014about half an hour, with ten minutes of prepared remarks in the beginning. He often escapes from the podium without facing many tough questions from mainstream journalists. (This month, perhaps hoping to foreclose public scrutiny, or to starve \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d of material, Spicer did his briefings off-camera for a week.)<\/span>
<\/span> Major Garrett, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News, sits in the front row. \u201cHistorically, the way the briefing room has been organized is, the closer you are, the farther you\u2019ve come,\u201d Garrett said. \u201cAnd the person at the podium has tended to recognize that.\u201d More experienced reporters, he said, \u201cask questions that are sharper, more informed. Not, \u2018What\u2019s your message today?\u2019 Not, \u2018Here\u2019s a paintbrush\u2014would you paint us a pretty picture?\u2019 \u201d If established reporters got fewer questions relative to the floaters, I asked, would this be good or bad for democracy? \u201cWe\u2019ll see,\u201d Garrett said. \u201cWe\u2019re engaged in a grand experiment.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span> A TV correspondent told me that calling on front-row reporters first isn\u2019t just about appealing to their egos: \u201cIt\u2019s also about maintaining a sense of predictability, a sense that eventually the substantive questions will be answered. Throwing that into chaos\u2014\u2018Maybe you\u2019ll get a question, if you shout loud enough, who knows?\u2019\u2014makes everyone desperate and competitive and makes us look like a bunch of braying jackals. Which I don\u2019t think is an accident.\u201d<\/span>
<\/span> \u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span>
<\/span> A longtime Washington reporter from a mainstream network echoed that sentiment. \u201cI don\u2019t mind them bringing in conservative voices that they feel have been underrepresented,\u201d he said. \u201cPersonally, I don\u2019t even mind them f%$#ing with the front-row guys, the Jonathan Karls of the world. Those guys are a smug little cartel, and it\u2019s fun to watch them squirm, at least for a little while. But at what point does it start to delegitimize the whole idea of what happens in that room? When does it cross the line into pure trolling?\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n(%$# mine<\/i>)<\/p>\n
I hope that Trump and his Evil Minions\u2122<\/sup> are trolling the press.<\/p>\nIt’s long overdue, and it is an indication that perhaps those smug guys in the front to stop preening at press briefing, and return to shoe leather journalism. <\/p>\n
It’s clear that the Bob Woodward model of context free access journalism simply does not cut it these days.<\/p>\n
It hasn’t for decades.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the annals of White House press corps(e) there has been a lot of whining. Now it appears that some of this “august” assemblage is wonder if Donald Trump is just f%$#ing with them. If this is the case, I cannot conceive of a more deserving group of dissolute reprobates. It appears that the administration …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[490,406,403,454],"class_list":["post-180566","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-hack-journalism","tag-stupid","tag-wanker","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180566"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180566"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180566\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180566"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180566"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180566"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}