White House Press Ban Not a Constitutional Crisis But …
So, I’ve been thinking about the so-called “Constitutional crisis” of White House flack Sean Spicer holding a private gaggle for some news outlets while not allowing other outlets — including CNN and the New York Times — to attend. I wouldn’t have even bothered writing about this except that a colleague asked me for my take on it and since then, I’ve been thinking about it. Instead of just ranting on Facebook, I gathered some notes, including some of my own varied experiences with the issue, and posted this.
In other words, like everything, I come at this from a lot of ways …
First, when the press becomes combative — like calling someone Hitler or reporting bogus stories from anonymous sources without any context or real, on-the-record information, and when they act as an arm of one political side, and when they are not reporting the news in a truthful manner, due to the hatred of the subjects they are covering — they no longer are legit news sources or news employees, in my mind.
As I always say — and I do — editors and reporters have opinions and should; but when we are creating “news,” we need to do everything in our power to suffocate and subdue all aspects of bias. It’s hard. But you know what? That’s why they call it work! If we are working in the opinion part of the press or on analytical pieces and label those pieces as such, that’s OK; the reader knows it is opinion. Far too often today though, there is too much of a blur, and it has gotten even worse in the age of Trump.
However, banning the press like Spicer did was not the best course of action. Ideally, the press shouldn’t be barred from anything like this — and, I would add, should not be kept off press release lists or anything else that is publicly circulated — but it is happening more and more. Instead, Spicer should just do what everyone in government and business does when they want to and that’s be selectively meeting with press members they may want to talk to who they think will be fair and honest, and give them exclusives. This is how it has always been done – and it works.
However, the opposite of my view that this is wrong is the fact that it all appears to be working: Trump’s holding his own with his people — in fact, they are wildly impressed with him railing against the fourth estate. Republicans don’t know what to make of any of it (not surprising). The Democrats have no ground at all (their faux fury after getting their own way for so long is laughable). And the media look like a bunch of wussies for complaining about access when they all know what they are doing.
Many of the working press, especially the inside-the-Beltway cocktail crowd by way of Manhattan and California are not unbiased — they are left-of-center on most issues; and not just how they cover issues but what they cover, too, and there are numerous examples that have been cited in the past. So many of them were found to be colluding with the Hillary Clinton campaign — thank you, way under reported WikiLeaks — it’s just mystifying (how do they get and keep their gigs while being so obvious?). As well, they now feel as if it is their mission to save the nation from Trump — as they did before, during the campaign, too. That’s not what “the news” is supposed to be about.
As well, the press, generalizing, should be an enemy of the state, in some ways, to protect the people, not to preserve its own status. As the old saying goes, “the duty of a newspaper to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” What is more comfortable than the state of the state and its massive bureaucracy? The press is supposed to be exposing corruption, hypocrisy, waste, fraud, abuse, the lying, etc.
The press is combative and active now and they were with President George W. Bush, too, and rightfully so, in many ways. But most weren’t with President Barack Obama and we saw that for eight long years — the media was asleep at the wheel. They saw him as a messiah, as did many voters, the first bi-racial president, often fawning all over each other with the most ludicrous questions I’ve ever heard from most of them. He was simply untouchable.
The press weren’t rabid dogs with President Bill Clinton, for the most part, either (yes, “rightwing” websites and talk radio were by they are not traditional press format). People forget that it was Newsweek that spiked the Monica Lewinsky story to protect him. The Washington Post did a lousy job looking into Whitewater — whereas books on the subject exposed the true stories. The Washington Post never assigned 21 reporters to look at Hillary Clinton or Obama in 2008 — or any Democrat, for that matter, back in the day when countless more journalists were working and had the time. The Washington Post never assigned 21 reporters to look at Clinton between 2013 when Ready for Hillary was launched or the election. Reporters were never assigned to pore through the Clinton Foundation documentation and information — see “Clinton Cash” — or the situation in Haiti or anything else. And that is the entire problem with the press right now — not Spicer saying, “Sorry, you’re not invited.”
The press coverage of some outlets not being invited to a gaggle really is kind of astounding, too, when you think about it. When James Rosen of Fox News was being spied on by the Obama Administration — spied on — there was barely a peep from the press. A Google search shows about 200,000 entries about the 2013 situation. Compare that to a similar search about Sean Spicer barring some media outlets which logs in at more than 2.9 million entries in 48 hours. It’s funny how that works.
The government spying on a journalist IS a Constitutional crisis; getting hurt feelings by not being included in a gaggle? Not so much.
Sharyl Attkisson also experienced a similar pushback from CBS for actually investigating debacles in the Obama Administration. I haven’t read her book “Stonewalled,” but I’ve heard it’s pretty good.
People also forgot all about this … in one outlet, the New York Times: “Calculated Candor Inside Obama’s Off-the-Record Briefings” … Obama, secretly limiting press access, while deluding and manipulating the public, too. No, that wasn’t a Constitutional crisis but no one in the nation was calling for his head either or claiming he was an authoritarian for limiting the press people he spoke with, on background, to have them all spin it like they could read his mind. That was negligent journacide right there.
Obama also booted some newspapers from his campaign plane in 2008 — but this got little play compared to the vehemence that Trump received during the campaign for doing something similar. He also blamed Fox News for everything that went bad with his administration — but this received little play in the rest of the press. Funny how that works.
My own experiences
I’ve had some of my own access experiences and even covered a similar situation here in New Hampshire about five years ago.
Back in 2012, our then-Speaker of the House, state Rep. William O’Brien, R-Mont Vernon, kept two Concord Monitor reporters from a press avail in his office about EBT card abuse.
The entire situation started in May 2012, when state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt, R-Manchester, during an argument about a procedural move, said “Sieg Heil” to O’Brien from the floor of Representatives Hall. Vaillancourt didn’t believe he was using it as a Nazi salute but that is how it was taken and O’Brien and others demanded an apology. He later offered one after hemming about it for about a half an hour.
Then-Monitor editorial cartoonist, Mike Marland, drew a cartoon of O’Brien with a Hitler mustache stating, “If the mustache fits …” There was a lot of back and forth about whether the cartoon was vulgar or acceptable, with editor Felice Belman, now at the Boston Globe, defending its publication in a blog post lost at the hands of time and Internet website upgrades that aren’t backed up. Marland then responded with a cartoon depicting O’Brien as Groucho Marx. Two weeks later, at a GOP picnic, O’Brien called the Monitor Democratic propagandists.
O’Brien later held a media avail and the office didn’t invite the Monitor’s two Statehouse reporters (the newspaper now has one reporter covering the beat and decided not to renew Marland’s contract earlier this year). The reporters found out about avail at the last minute and showed up. Shannon Bettencourt, an aide who was also pregnant at the time, didn’t allow the reporters in, since they weren’t invited, an interaction I caught on video, that later, went national, thanks to a pickup by the Huffington Post, first amendment orgs, and media business press outlets.
Not unlike the Spicer ban, some were critical that many in the press didn’t leave the O’Brien avail when we knew that the Monitor reporters were being kept out. As I noted at the time, my job is to my readers and my employer, not other media outlets. We’re not all members of some secret society or union. As well, had I left, I would not have been able to document anything that happened. I was also the only journalist to ask the speaker for comment about the issue. It was later noted, as it turned out, that previous speakers, including Democrats, often held gaggles and avails in their offices and didn’t invite every media outlet to them. There was no tempestuousness from anyone in the public or the press when that happened. In fact, most people didn’t even know …
O’Brien received a Muzzle Award for his actions in 2013. As Dan Kennedy noted:
Trouble is, though public officials are under no obligation to give journalists special treatment by (for instance) granting interviews, under the First Amendment they must give them equal treatment when holding official events such as a news conference on public property.
Like I said with the Spicer situation, personally, I would not have barred reporters from an avail like that. But after noting my displeasure, I would have targeted my future coverage, if I felt the need.
I kinda think that since Hitler and the Nazis killed millions of people, everyone should limit comparisons to them because there truly is no comparison to anyone alive in America.
I’ve also experienced limited access issues in the past, too, and it’s part of the job.
After putting together a number of hard-hitting stories that the Concord School District was not fond of — including my award-winning two-part investigation into how a cheerleading school board member landed the business director’s position, a job he was not qualified for, my story about how a beloved local teacher, who later became a school board member, who appeared to be railroaded out of her job, and how one of the new elementary school had skyline leaks, among other stories — I suddenly found myself dropped from the district’s press list. As well, the only stories that were ever included in the monthly school board packet were from the Monitor and not Concord NH Patch — even my non-controversial, feature posts were not put in.
There was no, however, allegiance to Patch by the Monitor because I was not getting press releases or unequal inclusion — it was to the Monitor’s news advantage that I was kept out of the loop.
In fact, there was almost what seemed like a mystical collusion at hand between the newspaper and the school district. And, given my knowledge and previous interactions with both entities, that should came as no surprise … not telling the truth about the actual costs of the elementary school consolation project, figures that weren’t correctly revealed in the Monitor until years after historic buildings were knocked down and $90.8 million was committed to be spent … or the time that the superintendent, then-board president, the city’s state Senator, another state Senator, and the district’s attorney, who was cited by the New Hampshire Attorney General later for violating the lobbying law, met in secret and hijacked approved legislation that permanently stole voting rights away from city residents … or the newspaper’s editor, after being handed all the investigatory documents about said hijacking, refusing to assign it to a reporter so a story could be written — something that would have been front page if it were not a friend of the editor’s or was a Republican who did it — saying, it wasn’t news etc.
When I was working in Belmont, Mass., there was also an active contingent of residents, including Town Meeting members and I suspect, officials, too, who were in open revolt against the newspaper and only supporting the town’s Patch site with tips and other things because they didn’t approve of my editorials, analytical pieces, or tenor of the stories I worked on or that interested me. Was this a crisis? No. It’s the part of journalism we really don’t like much — being criticized. Personally, I learn more from critique than praise; but like everyone, praise is great to get, too.
Frighteningly, we have become a nation that only feels safe in its own news echo chamber and that feels the need to censor and control everything until it fits into their own personal, political positions — and this is the biggest problem of the times we live in right now.
So, again, what Spicer did is not a Constitutional crisis but … there are other, more productive ways of getting around biased journalists and media outlets, to get news out to the public.
Credit: CBS News.