Obama’s Tireless Efforts On the Basketball Court and Golf Course Cause BP to Successfully Insert New Pipe to Siphon Oil to Surface
By Doug Powers • May 16, 2010 03:06 PM
http://michellemalkin.com/2010/05/16/obamas-tireless-efforts/
I’ll leave it to Chris Matthews to find a way to link the two, but first, the potentially good news:
Engineers trying to stop an oil leak deep below the surface of Gulf of Mexico have successfully inserted a mile-long pipe to siphon oil from the disastrous spill, British Petroleum said Sunday.
BP says they are now capturing some of the leaking oil, and hopfully all of it eventually.
President Obama was notified, but only after bees swarmed his motorcade on the way to chur… er, I mean, on the way to play basketball:
Keith Olbermann has dismissed the swarm as racist “Beebaggers” upset at the health care bill.
Congressman Clyburn was in the car and claims to have heard at least two of the bees buzzing racial slurs, though news footage doesn’t as yet support that claim.
As luck would have it, smoke has a calming effect on bees, so all the president had to do was roll down the window and the bees slowly headed back to Michelle’s garden.
And if shooting hoops wasn’t enough, yesterday Obama spent majority of his Saturday trying to plug up the oil leak by jamming golf balls into every hole in the ground he could find:
And it might have worked!
If BP’s latest effort doesn’t go as well as expected, the administration’s going to offer the stubborn leak a Medal for Courageous Restraint and see if that’s enough to get it to stop.
Twitter @ThePowersThatBe
Miami Herald
Posted on Sun, May. 16, 2010
White House message machinery spinning faster than ever
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/16/1632037/white-house-message-machinery.html
By STEVEN THOMMA
McClatchy Newspapers
In the days after an oil rig exploded last month in the Gulf of Mexico, the White House faced not only a looming environmental catastrophe but also a potential public relations disaster.
Aides feared a story line would take hold that President Barack Obama had responded too slowly to the spreading oil slick, damaging him politically much as the slow federal response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 discredited former President George W. Bush.
So while the federal government began reacting to the spreading oil, the White House message machine swung into action.
Within hours, it was cranking out a sustained barrage across the broad spectrum of modern communications - statements, reports, e-mails, tweets, photos and videos - all punctuated by a high-profile presidential visit to the Gulf followed by an incendiary speech at the White House and a video recap with exclusive behind-the-scenes views of Obama in “West Wing Week,” the White House’s new online program at www.whitehouse.gov.
Whether it’s Obama sitting with one reporter or a statement sent via Twitter, nothing happens by accident. The White House message machinery is a crucial element of the ever-expanding presidency. .......
To break through, he’s assembled a vast team to promote his agenda, whether it’s selling a policy such as his health care overhaul, providing information about government programs such as the H1N1 vaccine or simply making him look good - or less bad than others might.
“Because we are in such a hyper-partisan, polarized media environment, a lot of what we do is correcting misinformation. That’s part of implementing his agenda,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director.
THE MESSAGE
On April 29, press secretary Robert Gibbs rolled out Obama and a gusher of Cabinet officers to tell the news media about all the things the administration was doing to combat the oil spill.
That day, Gibbs sent his first oil leak message via Twitter, announcing that Obama had received a 20-minute briefing on the spill.
Others would follow.
“Our comprehensive look inside the aggressive response,” boasted one from deputy press secretary Bill Burton on May 5, with a link to an 11,500-word report from the White House detailing the “around the clock” response from the government. It included 73 mentions of the president.
“A busy day here, but the president has not taken his eyes off the BP spill,” said a May 10 White House tweet, complete with White House photos of Obama meeting with top aides in the Situation Room.
Twitter is just one of the new media tools White House officials use to deliver their messages. It allows them to reach voters directly without filtering or commentary from the news media. Gibbs alone reaches 60,000 people who receive his Tweets; White House Twitter messages reach 1.8 million.
PHOTOS
An hour after his first oil spill tweet, Gibbs used Twitter again to send a picture of Obama getting briefed. Message: The president is personally engaged. The shot was taken by official White House photographer Pete Souza, whose office sends out a steady stream of flattering, behind-the-scenes shots of the president, distributed via Flickr and posted on www.whitehouse.gov.
Souza and his colleagues, who include former McClatchy-Tribune Information Services photographer Chuck Kennedy, are respected former journalists. However, their work can be controversial when the White House uses it to replace independent journalism.
The White House shut out photojournalists and instead sent out Souza’s photos when Obama signed an executive order on abortion this year, and when he restaged his inaugural swearing-in last year with Chief Justice John Roberts Jr.
“Pete Souza is a fantastic photographer, but he works for the White House,” said Ed Henry, a CNN reporter and the secretary of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
“A photographer on the White House payroll is going to release one photo out of the hundreds he takes. It’s going to be the one that casts the president in the best possible light.”
From the time the Obama White House decided to launch its coordinated push on the oil spill, it bombarded the news media with e-mail reports on the federal response, emphasizing words such as “aggressive” and “immediate.”
“Administration-wide response,” said one e-mail on May 1, introducing a phrase that would be used repeatedly.
“President Obama visited the Gulf Coast to inspect response operations firsthand, underscoring the administration’s all-hands-on-deck response,” said another on May 2.
VIDEOS
The White House also produces its own video. Obama’s trip to the Gulf Coast on May 2 was covered not only by the news media, but also by the White House’s video team.
By May 4, whitehouse.gov had posted a video recap. By May 6, it showcased a new version on its “West Wing Week” webcast, “Your guide to everything that’s happening at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”
“It’s packaged like a hybrid between a week in review program and a documentary version of the old entertainment series ‘West Wing,’ “ said Gerald Jordan, an associate professor of journalism at the University of Arkansas. “Ultimately, there will be an audience that is so accustomed to fragmented media ... that they might meet at some point.”
THE LEADING MAN
The highest-profile White House messenger is the president himself. As the oil spill grew, so did Obama’s public role, from the May 2 visit to the Gulf to an appearance Friday in the Rose Garden.
Obama plays his role as public messenger much as his most recent predecessors did. In his first 15 months, he gave 620 speeches, very similar to the 15-month totals for Bush and for President Bill Clinton, according to Kumar.
For all the outreach via Twitter and other new media, Obama himself prefers the old media, which still aggregate the largest audiences. He uses the old media very differently, however.
He takes fewer questions from reporters in open sessions and gives many more one-on-one interviews, particularly to The New York Times, which the White House uses to deliver its message to the nation’s cultural and economic elite, starting with network and cable television news producers.
In 15 months, Obama took questions in formal news conferences or short sessions 83 times. Bush did it 205 times over that period; Clinton 367 times.
Obama gave far more interviews, however: 184 in his first 15 months, compared with 56 for Bush and 61 for Clinton. Of Obama’s interviews, 108 went to TV, 52 to newspapers and magazines, 11 to radio, 11 to mixed media and two to online organizations.
“The reason he does interviews is he likes to explain things like a professor, with all the buts and wherefores. He doesn’t like short Q and A’s,” Kumar said.
“The ideal interview is a cross platform,” she said, meaning talking to someone who can deliver his message on TV or online to “get into the bloodstream fast” and then reinforce it with an article in a prestigious newspaper or magazine.
Thus, she noted, Obama has given multiple interviews to John Harwood of CNBC-TV and The New York Times. The Times is the favored White House outlet, getting 20 percent of all print interviews last year. One of the official White House photos displayed on a West Wing wall shows Harwood exchanging high-fives with Obama during one of their interviews.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2514899/posts