Daily · Dreamtime

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 proclaim 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.( Read more... )

The media vs. Howard Dean

Democrats haven't voted yet, but reporters have got the story: The former Vermont governor is angry, gaffe-prone and unelectable. How do they know? Republicans, and anonymous Democrats, told them so.
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By Eric Boehlert

Jan. 13, 2004

When the Washington Post introduced readers to Howard Dean in a long Page 1 feature July 6, part of a series of "meet the Democrats" candidate profiles, the paper went for the jugular, literally, with a cartoonish, unflattering description to open the article: "Howard Dean was angry. Ropy veins popped out of his neck, blood rushed to his cheeks, and his eyes, normally blue-gray, flashed black, all dilated pupils."

Six months later, an extended version of that campaign narrative, polished by Republican talking-points memos and echoed day after day by the mainstream media, remains a constant of the campaign trail: Dean is a sarcastic smart aleck with foot-in-the mouth disease, a political ticking time bomb. The former Vermont governor remains the front-runner among Democratic voters, but he's gotten increasingly caustic treatment from the media, which has dwelled on three big themes -- that Dean's angry, gaffe-prone and probably not electable -- while giving comparatively far less ink to the doctor's policy and political prescriptions that have catapulted him ahead of the Democratic field. Newsweek's critical Jan. 12 cover story, "All the Rage: Dean's Shoot-From-the-Hip Style and Shifting Views Might Doom Him in November," achieved a nifty trifecta that covered anger, gaffes and electability, all three of the main media raps against Dean.
( Read more... )