Posted on 10/21/2003 10:04:51 PM PDT by Pikamax
Bush Pulls Press Corps Bypass CBS Says President Declaring a 'PR War' by Speaking Directly to Local News
By Doug Halonen and Michele Greppi
An initiative by President Bush on Columbus Day to bypass most of the White House press corps and take his message about what America is doing in Iraq to the American heartland was pronounced a success last week by an administration spokesman.
"It was an effort to reach Americans that get their news from their local television stations," said Allen Abney, a White House spokesman.
However, a CBS report labeled it the "public relations equivalent of a declaration of war."
The Bush media blast came in the form of a series of exclusive eight-minute-long interviews that the White House arranged with the five major station groups it said regularly cover the White House-Cox Television, Hearst-Argyle Television, Tribune Broadcasting, Belo and Sinclair Broadcast Group.
Station representatives said no ground rules were set on what questions could be asked.
But the president clearly wanted to use the forums to counter a growing perception that the U.S. campaign in Iraq is faring poorly. In his interview with Hearst-Argyle reporter Laurie Kinney, President Bush spelled out an additional reason.
"There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth," President Bush said. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels. And sometimes you just have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people, and that's what we will continue to do."
At the major networks' news departments, top executives seemed to feel that the journalistic sky had not fallen. They noted the networks had quick access to the video and audio from the regional interviews. Some doubted that the White House gambit would significantly alter the public's perception of the president and his performance.
Still, on a slow news day-because it was a holiday-the fact that Mr. Bush was talking to regional television outlets, but not the networks, made it into the Big 3 network evening newscasts. CBS News White House correspondent John Roberts, whose report was the one that likened the move to a war declaration, echoed the frequently heard opinion that the White House felt that local news interviewers would not question him as strenuously or insightfully as the press corps at the White House every day.
A spokesman for Hearst-Argyle, which was the pool organization handling the three cameras used during the round of interviews, said: "We reject the notion that we can be counted on for softball questions. That's not why we won so many journalism awards."
The Hearst-Argyle spokesman said: "Our Washington bureau has been around since 1988. They earned a Dick Cheney interview in July 2001. They've been working to get an interview with President Bush since the administration took office. They've conducted interviews recently with Ambassador [Paul] Bremer and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and [the station groups] earned this interview on the basis of the fact that our nightly newscasts consistently draw a larger collective audience than any of the national cable news networks."
Cissy Baker, Tribune Broadcasting's VP for news operations, was also adamant that Tribune did not go easy on the president. She said Grant Rampy, who is her 24-station group's Washington correspondent, is no "fly-by-night" local reporter who's never been to the White House.
Mr. Rampy, a one-time newspaper reporter who broke into TV as the late Roger Mudd's research assistant, covers the White House for Tribune Broadcasting, which has its own White House work space and unilateral standup location, from which Mr. Rampy files perhaps 20 live shots a day. "We are on a par with any network correspondent," Ms. Baker said.
Ms. Baker added that Mr. Rampy's interview was much in demand for a couple of days-with pickup by two wire services and requests for tapes or transcripts from as far away as Italy for copies from eight networks. "The questions he asked the president made news."
The biggest ripples were made when Mr. Rampy posed a question that began by noting that even Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Richard Lugar, appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" the day before, had said the president had lost control of Iraqi policy because of administration infighting and that concluded with Mr. Rampy's asking the president: "What if we were to get out now?"
The President said bailing out of Iraq now would "be a terrible mistake" and said ""politicians here in Washington, D.C., who make comments [are] just wrong about our strategy. We've had a strategy from the beginning. ... And the person who is in charge is me."
One goal clearly was accomplished. Coverage either led the newscasts or received favorable airtime on most of their more than 120 stations, reaching millions of viewers in 34 states. "It got play on all of our stations," said Heidi Wiedenbauer, Cox Television Washington bureau chief.
It is likely that the Bush administration will take this tack again. Recent research has shown that more Americans get their news from their local stations than from the TV networks. Indeed, a Radio and Television News Directors Foundation study earlier this year found that 49.9 percent of the public said they get most of their news from local stations, while only 23.2 percent said they get it from national TV networks.
There's nothing new about a president doing an end-run around the TV networks and other major news organizations. Stephen Hess, a senior fellow for the Brookings Institution, said every president at least since Richard Nixon has tried to go around Washington's national press corps, in part on the belief that they'll get better, gentler play that way. "They think the Washington press corps is cynical," Mr. Hess said. "And of course, they are."#
Indeed. It's a war against Stalinist idiot liberals and their pals in the press.
Bush has outsmarted the media censors? How refreshing!
Historically, a president could ask for prime time to make announcements and hold press conferences and recently the Big Three have decided that airing "Survivor" or "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire" was more important. Bush can't "go over their heads" the same way Reagan did because he has to first convince the Big Three to perform their civic duty.
Bush should give exclusives to Fox and the locals, not only because he'll get fairer qiestions because his base is more likely to be listening to his answers.
CBS has been at war against Bush since he announced he was running for president.
| An initiative by President Bush on Columbus Day to bypass most of the White House press corps and take his message about what America is doing in Iraq to the American heartland was pronounced a success last week by an administration spokesman. "It was an effort to reach Americans that get their news from their local television stations," said Allen Abney, a White House spokesman. However, a CBS report labeled it the "public relations equivalent of a declaration of war."
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"There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth," President Bush observed recently, regarding news coverage on Iraq. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people."
The 'filter' the President refers to is the filter of Big Media reportage, which reports regularly of tremendous progress Saddam forces have made since the fall of Saddam in April. The fall of Saddam -- a minor setback for Saddam, really -- was prompted by the evil Halliburton-led invasion of Iraq in late March. The 3 major broadcast networks -- part of the filter -- say they're not really anti-Bush, only trying to set the record straight: That Bush is a warmonger, his advisers are warmongers and postwar setbacks for Saddam haven't really happened. The post-Saddam aftermath has gone swimmingly for Saddam, despite what Bush says, Big Media insists. Forty-three of 55 top Baathists are dead or captured, but that's no big deal. Things are looking upbeat for Saddam. Don't let Bush fool you, Saddam isn't bogged down in any Quagmire, they say. It's America, not Saddam, on the run in postwar Iraq. From Basra to Mosul, Saddam is making very good progress, dismantling Coalition forces triumphantly. The besieged Coalition forces are led by evil neo-con think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, in league with Skull and Bones, in league with Halliburton, which seeks global hegemony for Halliburton, says Big Media.
Big Media refuses to say how long before Neo-Con-led forces are driven out and Saddam's march to Baghdad is complete. But it could happen any day now, you'll see.
To justify war, the neo-cons, led by Richard Perle, sought to foster the notion that Saddam was a bad guy, among other misconceptions. In fact, so deep, so profound, so nefarious was this neo-con plot, that the neo-cons even got Saddam's inner circle of advisers to fool Saddam, telling him he had Weapons of Mass Destruction when he really didn't. This misinformation was then fed to the CIA -- all part of a plot hatched by Fred Barnes and Richard Perle to start a war against an innocent dictator misled by top advisers who were taking orders from neo-cons in Washington.
"Was (Saddam) tricked by his own people?" Brit Hume asked not-yet-Arnoldized Rep. Jane Harmon, California Democrat, on Fox News Sunday. "It's a possibility," replied the brilliant Congresscritter.
Hume, impressed with her brilliance, pressed Harmon further: "The greatest intelligence hoax of all time, you now believe in it."
Harmon: "I think."
But this doesn't get George W. Bush off the hook. "WEEK AFTER WEEK AFTER WEEK AFTER WEEK, WE WERE TOLD LIE AFTER LIE AFTER LIE AFTER LIE!!," Sen. Ted Kennedy calmly observed last week on the Senate floor, denying his personal attacks were personal attacks. BUSH LIED! SADDAM NEVER LIED! Obviously Bush, an evil mastermind, was in on the plot to trick Saddam into thinking he still possessed WMD. Although Bush is an evil mastermind, at times he's the dumbest evil mastermind in history, forgetting to plant the Bloody Glove on Saddam. It's all so very clear.
But this evil right-wing plot is unraveling, rest assured, as the U.S. occupation has been a Miserable Failure.
Since the fall of Baghdad, Big Media has waged a massive public relations campaign, defending its opposition to military action through gazillions of articles and gazillions of hours of airtime, aimed at dispelling silly notions that Saddam might be losing and America might be winning the war.
Peter Jennings, Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and other Democrat officials strongly deny they're filters, or that they have a hidden agenda.
They're only trying to present a fair and balanced picture of the U.S. occupation, which, they say, has been horrible, shocking, brutal.
And a Quagmire.
Well, has it been a brutal Quagmire? I've done some digging.(For the record, Al Gore does not claim to have invented Quagmire).
Since Bush declared an end to major combat operations on May 1, Quagmire in Iraq has come under increasing fire. In the past 6 months, U.S. forces have pounded Iraq with 13,000 reconstruction projects and 1,500 school rehabilitations, confesses L. Paul Bremer, U.S. anti-Quagmire administrator in Iraq and notorious Quagmire-basher. The offensive dealt a heavy blow to Quagmire, leaving it in critical condition as of this writing (late Tuesday evening). Eight hundred schools in northern Iraq have been hit with new windows, new paint and new textbooks, a further setback for the embattled Quagmire.
Coalition forces, in another major offensive, have attacked Iraq with higher salaries for doctors and teachers and 22 million vaccination doses to children, a major blow to contagious disease, raising still more doubt about Quagmire's poor postwar planning. Six months of bungling and ineptitude Quagmire has amassed has left Quagmire's struggling mission in serious doubt, even among its loyalist fans at Democrat headquarters and France. All 240 hospitals and all 1,200 clinics in Iraq are up and running, a very troubling development for Quagmire as bacteria spores and disease face increasingly long odds. Folks, this stuff is World Series! Er, Serious.
The unrelenting reconstruction barrage unleashed by Coalition forces have brutally killed the electricity shortage, with power now exceeding pre-war levels and 75% of pre-war telephone services restored, another terrible setback for Quagmire. The energy crunch has lost so much ground, few believe it can ever recover. Not even Affirmation Action -- for example, giving the energy crunch special admissions preference in 10 percent of homes in Iraq -- can save it now. It's all so terribly unfair!
While the French and Old Europe Democrats are Quagmire's biggest fans, hostility towards Quagmire runs at fever pitch among our troops. (Sorta like Cubs fans towards Steve Bartman after inning 8, Game 6 at Wrigley? Nah, wouldn't go that far.)
Throughout Iraq, Quagmire is getting ambushed, outmaneuvered. With Coalition forces on the hunt, Quagmire can run, but Quagmire can't hide. The string of U.S.-led raids, seizing hundreds of Quagmire "guerrilla" reinforcements, bedevils the struggling Quagmire, as it grapples with increasingly sophisticated U.S. resistance to Quagmire.
Dealing a massive setback to street crime, Coalition forces have carpet-bombed Iraq with over 40,000 new Iraqi police now on duty, with more on the way. Frustrating Democrats and other die-hard Saddam supporters further, the new Iraqi police force has no intention of handing control back to Quagmire any time soon.
An outbreak of severely contagious freedom has infected the country, with over 170 new newspapers in circulation. (Don't know if the New York Times or L.A. Times are on stands though, given Iraqi distaste for Ba'athist propaganda, plagiarism and 30-year old grope stories about Arnold, an icon in Baghdad.) Satellite dishes, forbidden under Saddam, are now sold on street corners everywhere.Transmitting the infectious condition further, "all 22 universities and 43 technical institutes and colleges are (now) open, as are nearly all primary and secondary schools," added Ambassador Bremer, in a further grim assessment for Quagmirists. "Today nearly all of Iraq's 400 courts are functioning," as signs and symptoms of freedom spread by the hour. Threatening Iraq with a successful transition to democracy, elected local councils now dot the land, as 25 ministers -- selected by evil Halliburton! -- run the central government in Baghdad. With oil pumping at near pre-war levels, a new currency, and growing anti-Quagmireism throughout the country, the future for Quagmire looks increasingly bleak as pervasive U.S. success grows evermore...pervasive. Quagmire's early success was waaaaaay overrated.
While top Democrats believe the road to the White House leads through Baghdad -- drive U.S. forces from Iraq, and the White House goes Dem in '04 -- unless Quagmire 'finds its voice,' and soon, Quagmire is doomed in the sands of Iraq.
Anyway, that's...
My two cents...
"JohnHuang2"
good column there!!
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