W & aides broadcast media hate

I searched FR for Ken Auletta, the New Yorker and the New York Daily News to see if this was posted before but no hits. Anyways I thought it was suspicious so I am posting it to see what some of your thoughts are.

Search by article title, too.

Predictably, the reporters who cover Bush aren't happy. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank complains: "My biggest frustration is that this White House has chosen an approach ...to engage us as little as possible." And the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller grouses: "Too often they treat us with contempt."

Can't imagine why, sweeties.

Too often they treat us with contempt."

Something about reaping what you sow comes to mind...

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank complains: "My biggest frustration is that this White House has chosen an approach ...to engage us as little as possible.

Very wise, G.W.

Btw, Mr. President, can you get me a date with Peggy Noonan?

With stunners like that, no wonder he spends so little time with journalists.

I guess freeing over 50,000,000 people in 2 countries from brutal dictatorships doesn't count as doing something for human rights.

This is beginning to sound like a new talking point - Bush doesn't talk or work with the press - boo hoo - we need someone who will . . . I imagine we'll hear more of this in the weeks to come.

Dana Milbank is a 110% "I hate Bush" democrat. His articles are nothing but hit pieces and he continually spreads lies by using Klinton holdovers.

And the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller grouses: "Too often they treat us with contempt."

Elisabeth, you're lucky the administration doesn't "round" you up, and put you all in a circular firing squad! Yoi! ;)

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank complains: "My biggest frustration is that this White House has chosen an approach ...to engage us as little as possible." And the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller grouses: "Too often they treat us with contempt."

I just heard something.

It sounded like a pot calling a kettle "black."

Yet George W. Bush tells New Yorker writer Ken Auletta: "No President has ever done more for human rights than I have." With stunners like that, no wonder he spends so little time with journalists.

I wonder if Ken Auletta edited out the phrase "for Iraqis" somewhere in that quote.

http://www.newyorker.com/printable/?online/040119on_onlineonly02

Bush’s Press Problem
Posted 2004-01-13

This week in the magazine, Ken Auletta writes about the George W. Bush Administration’s relationship with
the American press, and about how the President manages to keep reporters at a distance. Here, with The New Yorker’s Daniel Cappello, Auletta discusses how that relationship affects the public.

DANIEL CAPPELLO: All Presidents complain about the press. How is the Bush White House different?

KEN AULETTA: In two ways. They are more disciplined. They reject an assumption embraced by most reporters: that we are neutral and represent the public interest. Rather, they see the press as just another special interest. The discipline flows down from President Bush, who runs the White House like a C.E.O. and demands loyalty. This is a cohesive White House staff, dominated by people whose first loyalty is to Team Bush. When Bush leaves the White House, most of his aides will probably return to Texas. They are not Washington careerists, and thus they have less need to puff themselves up with the Washington press corps. In fact— and this leads to the second difference—from Bush on down, talking to the press off the record is generally frowned upon and equated with leaking, which is a deadly sin in the Bush White House (unless it is a leak manufactured to advance the President's agenda).

Members of the Bush Administration complain that the media are too liberal, and too biased. Do they have a point?

Sometimes. Although the press’s surveys of the Washington press corps are less scientific than many conservative critics say they are, privately many White House reporters concede that they are probably somewhat more liberal than the majority of American voters. One often glimpses the bias in abortion stories, in which right-to-life proponents are sometimes portrayed as fanatics, while those who are pro-choice are portrayed as human-rights advocates. But these are rarely conscious biases. Most reporters, I think, strive to be fair. In fact, while White House officials think there is a liberal bias in the press, they don't believe this is terribly important. They describe the press as critical of every President, not just a conservative President.

You write that George W. Bush is influenced by his mother, Barbara Bush, who has a famous distrust of the press—she never spoke off the record to reporters when she was First Lady. Does someone in such a position have an obligation to be available?

I believe they do have that obligation. In a nonparliamentary system such as ours, close questioning of the President is supposed to come from the press, usually in the form of press conferences. Yet Bush has held only eleven solo press conferences, fewer than almost any modern President. Over a comparable period, his father held seventy-one and Bill Clinton thirty-eight. The Bush White House claims that they have answered thousands of press questions, but the bulk of those answers come from the handful of questions allowed a couple of times a week after photo opportunities, and from joint press conferences, where the President gets only one-quarter the number of questions and few follow-up questions are permitted.

Has Bush’s relationship with the press been shaped by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001? Or was the pattern in place beforehand?

Bush did not receive glorious press prior to September 11th, but he did afterward, because he became a wartime President. White House reporters see themselves in an adversarial relationship with this and any other White House. And certainly the White House views them that way. But, in retrospect, it is clear that the press did not scrutinize the Administration's weapons-of-mass-destruction claims as it should have. And parts of the press—most prominently Fox News, with its “Axis of Weasels”—treated dissent as anti-American. It was only after Bush’s May 1st “mission accomplished” appearance on the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln that the press turned more critical.

This Administration tries to be extremely proactive—to generate its own message. On what issues do you think it has been most successful?

It was most successful with something we’ve been talking about—selling the menace of Saddam Hussein. In fairness, people inside and outside the Administration had reason to fear that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction. After all, he deployed chemical and biological weapons against his own people and in the war with Iran. And he failed to provide evidence to U.N. inspectors that he had got rid of these weapons. But the Bush Administration did a couple of things that the press should have probed more deeply. First, it adopted the worst-case scenario, assuming that Saddam had these weapons. That is a cautious posture often adopted by conservative "realists," as was the case when the U.S. projected that the Soviet Union was more of a strategic military threat than it proved to be. It is a defensible posture. What is not defensible is when reporters don't carefully inspect and question the evidence, or when they ignore dissenting opinions and so-called facts. Second, Bush was clearly intent on ridding the Middle East of Saddam, and facts were bent in order to advance this goal. This, too, can be defended. But the job of reporters is to report on what is really going on, and we did not always do this.

White House correspondent used to be one of the most coveted positions at news organizations. Is that still true?

I think the White House correspondent is less important today. This is partly because the news organizations are less interested in government. It is partly because ambitious reporters are turned off by the stenographic aspects of the White House beat. And it is partly the result of having fewer standout journalistic “stars” covering the White House.

You’ve written a great deal about the business of news. Is reporters’ reluctance to challenge the White House's practices influenced by the fact that their ultimate employer is often an international corporation—G.E., News Corp., Time Warner—that may have regulatory business with the government?

The way that corporations most influence journalism, I think, is not by making reporters worry about advancing the regulatory goals of their corporate parents but by exerting pressure on them to boost circulation or ratings, and thus profits. This leads news outlets to offer more “gotcha” stories, more infotainment—more Michael Jackson and less World Trade Organization. This bias for conflict and sizzle is far more pervasive than any liberal or conservative press bias.

In your article, you write that Peter Jennings told you that there’s a feeling in the White House press corps that a reporter’s access depends on whether he or she is favored by the Administration. How much does the White House’s ability to control access shape the story?

The first cut of history is usually shaped by those who talk to the press. And those who talk generally receive more sympathetic coverage. It has always been thus. In this White House, where access is severely limited, those who talk get even more leverage. The difference between Democratic and Republican Administrations, one career civil servant said, is that when Democrats see a room of reporters they rush out to woo them, while Republicans keep a distance and are more disciplined about punishing miscreants. It takes a strong constitution to stand up to a parental authority.

Do you think that the White House can sustain its press discipline and message control?

Leaks accelerate when things are going less well. When U.S. postwar planning in Iraq seemed to be in shambles this summer, there were more leaks. If Bush continues to look politically strong, there will be fewer leaks.

Where are the Democrats in all this? Have they succeeded in getting an opposition message to the press? Do they even have a message to get out?

The Democrats were largely quiet in the lead-up to the war with Iraq, which is one excuse that reporters make for not probing Bush Administration claims. If there was no real opposition to Bush, they say, it is not our job to supply it. This is a fake argument. There were opponents of the war to be quoted. There were factual claims to be adjudicated as true or false. And journalism is not the same as a Ping-Pong match, where we just report the ping and the pong from each side. Our task is to try to sort out the objective truth as best we can.

One of the more striking quotes in your piece is from Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, who told you that he doesn't believe the press has a “check-and-balance function.” But should it, in a democratic society?

Yes. One of the reasons we have such extraordinary freedoms under the First Amendment is that the Founding Fathers understood the need for checks and balances—three coequal branches of government and, eventually, a Fourth Estate: the press. We don’t have a parliamentary system, so the press, which has access to public officials, has to ask questions.

OK I also found this at the New Yorker.

This just isn't true! Last night Brit Hume talked about having lunch with the President with a group of reporters earlier in the day. Some reporters seem to have access. :)

I told my wife during the 2000 campaign that if Bush won things would change in light of the mainstream press taking sides. Now, Fox News has access to the administration and is on top. The Wall Street Journal has replaced the New York Times as the op/ed page of record. Don't tell me those clymers don't know exactly what's happened to them and why.

Ok I checked the guys website (http://www.kenauletta.com/) but didn't find anything on it there. The reason I am curious is that my idiot liberal friend sent me the following article that denigrates Bush based on this claim
that ("No President has ever done more for human rights than I have.").

So I did a search on the quote and that is what I came up with.

here is the article

http://thestar.ca/NASApp/cs/ContentServer?pagename=thestar/Layout/Article_PrintFriendly&c=Article&cid=1074294906782&call_pageid=970599109774

Jan. 17, 2004. 01:00 AM

Calling Bush `disengaged' insults the disengaged

SLINGER

How disengaged can you get?

When George W. Bush says, "No president has ever done more for human rights than I have'' — what do you suppose he means?

In that case, what do you suppose he means when he says Canada is welcome to bid on contracts for rebuilding Iraq?

And aside from what he said about Canada being allowed to bid, what do you suppose it says about somebody who believed him — somebody like Paul Martin?

Let's deal with the George Bush question first since it has implications for the whole world. Paul Martin is mainly a local issue.

If we rule out irony — imagine Winston Churchill wisecracking during the Blitz, "No prime minister has done more to increase German armaments production than I have,'' and I seriously doubt that's the sort of thing Bush had in mind regarding human rights, so I think it's safe to rule out irony — there is only one possible answer.

It's not specific to this astonishing pronouncement. Another example was his saying last summer that Saddam Hussein had been given a chance to allow UN weapons inspectors into Iraq, but "he wouldn't let them in. And, therefore, after a reasonable request, we decided to remove him from power.'' This despite the fact that in the weeks prior to the U.S. invasion, the UN finished a four-month inspection of Iraq.

George Bush has been accused of lying about things, but I don't think he was lying when he told a Washington Post reporter that Saddam wouldn't let UN inspectors into Iraq, even though they'd been there till nearly the last minute, any more than when, right out of the blue, he told a writer from The New Yorker that no other U.S. president was his equal when it came to human rights.

I think he believed every word. What we want to know is why he'd believe stuff like this.

To answer that we need to consider what his former treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, just said about getting the impression that, while George W.'s porch light was on, nobody was home when O'Neill knocked. The adjective many commentators are using to describe this Bush quality is "disengaged.''

This takes us back 20 years to Ronald Reagan whose hands-off (and maybe a lot more than just hands) approach was also described as "disengaged,'' although not by Calvin Trillin, who wrote in The Nation that he found "the usage a bit cumbersome — it struck me as the equivalent of saying `She's really more than a disengaged blonde' or `It was nothing but disengaged luck.'''

The Bush promotional machine keeps putting the story around that no matter what you might suspect, George W. is actually a whiz-bang thinker. The facts, however, don't overly support this view, as when, a month before he said Saddam refused to let the UN into Iraq, he gave an interview to a Polish TV network in which he flat-out stated, "We found the weapons of mass destruction.''

I don't think he was trying to pull the wool over Poland. I just think it was a really disengaged thing to say.

Everybody who knew anything about the subject realized Ronald Reagan's Star Wars anti-missile missiles idea was a figment of his imagination, which is why they call Bush's plan to revive it "too disengaged for words.'' On the other hand, since he's from Texas, no Texan will ever concede that George himself is "disengaged as a box of rocks,'' or come right out and say "He's so disengaged he couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were written on the heel,'' which is what Texans say when they believe you're too disengaged to live.

A friend of mine was being a little snarky when he complained after the big confab in Mexico, their first face-to-face, that the George Bush and Paul Martin show ought to be called Disengaged And Disengageder, except it is kind of helpful when we take what they say came out of it and hold it up to the light.

Paul Martin, we have been told time and again, has a 1,000-horsepower brain in first-class working order — you can't make all those millions as a businessman if you're disengaged as a post.

But if this is the case, why would he think we'd buy it when he said what he accomplished in his get-together with Bush was a great achievement?

Or am I too disengaged to get it?

Slinger's column usually appears Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday.

Additional articles by Slinger

And lets not forget the $15,000,000,000 he wants to provide to Africa for AIDS. Or do saving black people not count as the UN is a testiment to?

Just what would freeing Afghanistan from one of the most brutal regimes on earth...be called.

About those millions of Iraqi's freed from the murderous Hussein.......

Ms. Bumiller, just what would you call expecting you to don your kneepads be called if not contempt.

I have yet to see that remark he attributes to Bush in print. I doubt he even said it.

That would make sense. I was looking around, and couldn't find the original article to see in what context it was taken. What I did find was some presumably leftwing site called Unknown News that had a link to the posted article and a link to the New Yorker site but not to the original New Yorker article (actually a press release). I did some searching but was unable to come up with the original. Here is the link to the Unknown News site.

http://www.unknownnews.net/insanity011404.html

Anyways the above site asks "Is George Bush insane?", because of this "quote". That got me somewhat interested in finding out the real deal. I figure that it was taken out of context like you said deliberately.

Why the heck should this administration go out of it's way to do anything for the media? They know that the leftist press is against them and reports only negative about every move they make! And it is true, they don't owe them squat!