Is White House spokesman the 'most useless' one ever?

WASHINGTON — White House spokesman Tony Snow made a startling claim earlier this month, one that shed some light on changing perceptions about the job he's doing.

During a briefing, Snow responded to a question about climate change by noting that, "We're talking about nuclear development, which is now championed by, among others, Greenpeace."

"I think there's some Greenpeace people who are certainly advocates of nuclear power," Snow said.

"Golly, you know, I can't believe the White House would get that wrong," said Jim Riccio, Greenpeace nuclear policy analyst. "Greenpeace was founded as an anti-nuclear organization, and we have been fighting nuclear weapons and their evil offspring, nuclear power, ever since."

White House reporters don't expect much from Snow, which goes part of the way toward explaining why his claim about Greenpeace went largely unremarked.

It's been less than a year since Snow started the job amid a clamor of hype — including claims by Snow and others at the White House that he would be in the room for the heavy policy stuff, with a voice and a role to play.

The former Fox News personality quickly established himself as a glib and energetic adversary for the press, sometimes short on information but strong with a comeback. He learned everyone's name and all their peccadillos.

These days, whatever honeymoon goodwill he had has largely worn off — and if Snow sticks around, he still has two years to go.

Reporters complain that Snow is frequently unprepared and that he personalizes encounters — Snow recently told CNN's Ed Henry to "calm down" during an exchange over White House claims that the Iranian government was behind explosives seized in Iraq.

Most damningly, by Washington standards, many reporters covering the White House don't believe Snow has the inner-circle role or the access he was promised.

A latecomer to the administration, Snow is an outsider in a famously insular operation. He is not one of the Texans, like Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president, that Bush turns to in meetings.

For his part, Snow says that he is in the room when it's appropriate, and that his evasions and tap-dancing are sometimes intentional.

"There are going to be times when for various reasons — national security, or sometimes even the propriety of dealing with other individuals in Washington and around the world — you are, in fact, going to clam up for a little while until others have had their chance to speak," he said.

At a forum this week at the National Press Club featuring Snow and a group of White House correspondents, a New York Times reporter half-jokingly called Snow "the most useless press secretary ever."

Snow says he's not sweating it, and waves off suggestions that there is animosity on either side.

"What you see quite often at the briefings are sharp exchanges," he said. "It's not personal."

Either way, Snow has redefined the role of White House press secretary, probably forever. During last year's campaigns, Snow was in demand as a speaker at Republican events — raising money for candidates and pushing the White House message.

He has also addressed Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill — a task usually reserved for high-ranking administration officials. He said he loves the job.

After the forum at the National Press Club, Snow stood on the edge of the stage, signing autographs for members of the public.

Bloopers of the century
Columbia Journalism Review, Jan/Feb 1999 by Leo, John

Blunders, hoaxes, goofs, flubs, boo-boos, screw-ups, fakes

The public seems to find TV and movie bloopers hilarious and endearing, but it's safe to say that no such enthusiasm is law ished on the gaffes of journalists. DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN, a victory that was confined to page one of a single edition of a certain Chicago paper, is always good for a traditional chuckle. But who knows or cares that UP (father of UPI) once announced that World War I was over when it wasn't, or that Time Warner's Pathfinder site managed to declare O.J. Simpson "Guilty!" on the day the jury turned out to have a somewhat different opinion?

Why is it that the movie Titanic could find no room in its 194 minutes of screen time to discuss the most famous headline ever published by the Baltimore Evening Sun? ALL TITANIC PASSENGERS ARE SAFE; TRANSFERRED IN LIFEBOATS AT SEA said the paper's page one head of April 15, 1912. And it's heartwarming to know that the famous headline is still giving assurance to Sun readers. Certain editors have been known to send the headline to people who complain that the paper doesn't carry enough positive news.

The Sun's famous mistake, repeated by the Los Angeles Express, had many authors - a White Star spokesman who kept explaining that the Titanic was unsinkable, radiomen who garbled emergency messages and the usual mix of reporters eager to beat the competition with news almost certain to be correct, since everybody already knew the ship couldn't possibly sink.

One confident but verb-free deck of the Sun's erroneous headline said TOW ING GREAT DISABLED LINER INTO HALIFAX. This phrase had some basis in realworld confusion: a message sent from ship to ship in Morse code confused Titanic with a no-name oil tanker, which in fact was being towed to Halifax because of engine trouble. A few frantic radio operators who came upon the message in the middle of transmission assumed the report referred to Titanic and passed the word on. The moral for modern days: assume nothing.

All journalists know that it's never enough to get it wrong. Those who do are expected to cluck over those who don't, so the New York Evening Sun ran a sidebar chiding The New York Times for publishing a ridiculous story that Titanic had sunk. The Wall Street Journal chimed in on a positive note, congratulating the builders of the ship for averting what might have been a serious accident. "The gravity of the damage to the Titanic is apparent, but the important point is that she did not sink," wrote the Journal. The reason for this marvel was that "her watertight bulkheads were really watertight."

Garbled accident reports are hardly the worst reportorial sins. The worst always involve getting it wrong on purpose. The name of Walter Duranty comes up quickly. Duranty covered the Soviet Union for The New York Times in the Stalin era. He is perhaps the only Pulitzer winner that The Paper of Record would fervently like to forget.

At first a critic of the Soviet Union, Duranty soon evolved into an enthusiastic supporter and state-of-the-art propagandist. One of his favorite comments was, "I put my money on Stalin." When friends asked about Stalin's tactics, Duranty liked to say "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Not that he noticed many broken eggs in Russia. When Stalin engineered massive famine in the Ukraine to help break resistance to Soviet control, Duranty told Times readers that "any report of a famine in Russia today is an exaggeration or malignant propaganda." In 1933, at the height of the famine, he wrote of abundant grain, plump babies, fat calves, and "village markets flowing with eggs, fruit, poultry, vegetables, milk, and butter at prices far lower than in Moscow." He added that "a child can see this is not famine but abundance."

In fact, the death toll was enormous and Duranty knew it. He told colleagues privately it was in the range of 10 million. British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge said Duranty was "the biggest liar of any journalist I ever met." But the Pulitzer committee praised Duranty's reports for their "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and clarity." Four errors, arguably five, in a single phrase.

Eventually, Duranty's Soviet coverage provoked debate among his editors and readers. To its credit, the Times editorial page challenged his accounts. But in the genteel journalistic world of that era, his reporting was never odious enough to get him recalled or fired. The embarrassing Pulitzer has never been withdrawn or returned.

Fake stories live forever in journalism. Clifford Irving's "autobiography" of Howard Hughes was sold in 1971 to McGraw-Hill for $750,000 and Time-Life for $250,000. The Hughes hoax was either unusually bold or unusually stupid, since Hughes was still alive and therefore in a good position to notice that he hadn't written an autobiography.

The fake diaries of Adolf Hitler could not be challenged by the alleged author, dead for almost forty years. In 1983 The German magazine Stern acquired rights to sixty-two volumes of the diaries, purportedly pulled from the wreckage of a cargo plane nine days before Hitler's suicide in 1945. Stern described the miraculous discovery of the diaries as "the journalistic scoop of the post World War II period."

Watch Julie Mason find the best dirt.
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