Posted on 04/22/2006 7:54:02 PM PDT by ncountylee
WITH Scott McClellan's announcement that he will hang up his flak jacket after nearly three years as White House press secretary, maybe it is time to ask one last question, even if he won't be around to answer it: Why continue with the daily press briefings at all?
Oh, there are reasons. Someone has to explain that tomorrow the president is meeting the German chancellor, and that next week he will be in Cincinnati talking with concerned citizens about — choose one — a) the prescription drug benefit b) the future of Social Security or c) new ways of turning switch grass into ethanol. And every once in a while the president orders up an invasion or the vice president points his shotgun in the wrong direction, and the world looks to the White House pressroom (and past the spaghetti of wires and empty Diet Coke cans) for answers.
But after nearly seven years of covering the White House, stretched over two administrations, four press secretaries, endless hours tinkering with the fractured hinge supporting the New York Times seat in the second row and hundreds of questions that have resulted in artful and artless evasive answers, I have come to a few conclusions.
One is that the press secretary is not likely to return as a major force on the White House stage anytime soon. The second is that the daily briefings now have less to do with covering the White House than ever, and their value is diminishing every year. At some point between Monica and the missing W.M.D., the sparring came to obscure the imparting of information about how and why decisions were made.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
dude...you don't like it stop b!tchin and get another gig....
I looked up Sanger. His bio says he is not yet 46 years old and has been working for the Times for over 24 years. I didn't think reporters actually started their careers at the Times, but I guess they need to get them young so the lobotomy can take. It looks like the only experience you need to work for the Times is experience being an ass.
Is he any relations to the that "Sanger" who started the the "Eugenics" project in America?
And being a frequent guest on P-BS says it all. I wonder if he would suggest to have Dan Rather be the next whitehouse press secretary.
Sometimes waiting for briefings to start, I fantasize that in Lincoln's time, reporters who dropped by to see John Hay or one of the other handful of insiders were told that the boss was about to fire General McClellan for messing up the war. When I look at those photos of reporters gathered in James Haggerty's crowded office during the Eisenhower administration, I imagine that they might be leveling about how bad their choices were in the cold war.
He's one of these, "When will you apologize to the American public, Mr. President?", scumbags.
Maybe that's because most of you are angry twits.
The 6 p.m. phone call to explain the president's thinking, or some internal debate, seems to be a lost art
Maybe that's because the New York Times and others have let their biases overwhelm the truth in their reporting, so what difference would it make when you intentionally filter out the truth before it hits the page? Things would be different if your agenda were to actually report the news rather than merely to sabotage the administration's policies and advance the goals of America's enemies...
He's not enthusiastic about the briefings because he dreads what it's going to be like when he asks some bitchy question and Tony Snow genially rips him a new one.
I didn't read the rest of it but he's right. Ending the press briefings would be another great way to stick it to the MSM. I'll bet Bush will think so if he reads this.
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