Former White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan’s name is now all over the best-seller charts, airwaves, newspapers and weblogs due to his anti-Bush administration memoir and the heated debate over his role — but is a key point getting lost in the book hype brou-ha-ha?
In fact, journalism prof/blogger Jay Rosen points out, McClellan is the symbol of a key Bush administration shift that in effect downgraded and denigrated the American press’ traditional treatment as “the fourth estate” by White Houses for some 100 years. But, in the end, Rosen argues, the Bush White House miscalculated in their assumptions of how far McClellan would let it go without comment.
As usual, Rosen’s piece needs to be read IN FULL but here are a few highlights:
“You got to be able to step back and look at the big picture,” said Scott McClellan on the Today show this morning, talking about his book disturbance. I did that in April 2006 when McClellan resigned as White House spokesman. See The Jerk at the Podium: Scott McClellan Steps Away. Most of what I have to say on this week’s events is in that post.
I never expected McClellan to write a book about being the jerk at the podium for Bush, or to make connections between his experience and the larger wreckage of the Bush presidency. He’s not only done that; he’s clearly ready to hit the circuit and explain himself. So to the wave of commentary here and coming, I offer another step back: a hundred-year perspective on this week’s events. The ruining of Scott McClellan was part of something way bigger, and to understand it we have to go back to the beginning of the White House press corps.
When did the White House press corps formally begin? And how long did Presidents honor its role as an institute to be respected, if not at times angrily and aggressively battled? Rosen’s answer: it began with a Republican President named Theodore Roosevelt and lasted 100 years — until the Bush administration made a decision to downgrade that pesky, questioning, non-cheering section press.
Rosen writes:
The modern era in presidential press think begins with Theodore Roosevelt, who directed that special quarters be built for reporters when renovations were made to the White House during his first term. In 1902 the work was completed: the press got invited into the heart of the presidency and the nature of presidential power shifted.
It shifted because of something Roosevelt had grasped: a national media system, then emergent, needed a big national narrative, and the President would be the main character in that narrative because, once elected, he alone stands for—as well before—the country as a whole. As head of government, ceremonial chief of state, and national protagonist—a triple advantage—the President would always dominate over other actors in the system. What today we call “commanding the stage,” because we take for granted that there is a stage, was in 1902 an imaginative leap forward into the media age.
With Roosevelt, often called the first modern president, the executive began its long ascendency over the other two branches, a development that sped into maximum overdrive with the president whom Scott McClellan served. The incorporation of the press into presidential power actually began a few years earlier with William McKinley, who first invited reporters into the White House and allowed them to hang out in a small room off the North Portico. Prior to that time they had taken to waiting in the street hoping to interview departing visitors. Congress was the nerve center of Washington then, and the more powerful branch. Its press gallery dates from 1841, 60 years before the White House supplied similar quarters.
Rosen doesn’t go into the well-known examples of Presidents who battled mightily with the press or faced hostile press corps: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, and the first President Bush.
But there was a difference, because all Presidents showed at least a semblance of deference to the press as an important institution.
Until the Bush administration — which began a process Rosen calls “rollback”:
That era [with the press being treated as the fourth estate] lasted almost exactly 100 years. Bush engineered a strategic shift, the press part of which I have called Rollback. Scott McClellan was a key figure in that shift, but he seems to have had a change of heart about it, which is important to whether the change becomes permanent or fades with Cheney and Bush gone.
Sensing an institution in decline and uncomfortable with interlocutors of any type, they decided to return the press to where it stood before McKinley: effectively out in the cold. But they didn’t go all the way and actually expel reporters from the executive mansion, which would have alerted the country—and the press—to something extreme going on.
Instead the Administration decided to innovate in other ways. It denied the whole theory of the “fourth estate,” ridiculed the idea that the press is part of the system of checks and balances, told reporters they were a special interest group rather than a conduit to the public-at-large, wiped out all remaining distinctions between propaganda and public information, and welcomed the de-legitimizing of the news media by allies in the culture war.
You can also see this to a certain extent in some weblogs today on the right and left that quote mainstream media news reports ad nauseum and use the mainstream media’s work to exist (how many blogs do all original reporting?) but blast the press as a bunch of partisan hacks or a monolithic entity. When they agree with reports or can use them, they use mainstream-media produced reports to provide a huge chunk of their websites’ foundational content. When they disagree with the news media, suddenly the media is untrustworthy (they’re ooooooooh so 20th century).
It’s part of the delegitimization of the main stream media — not just by the White House, but part of at an times sneering attitude on the part of some to “fact based journalism” itself. The argument is that there is no fact based journalism. If it doesn’t support a specific view or go after or after one view, it is therefore biased without admitting it’s biased.
Some might argue that this is one reason why newspapers are seemingly fading — but that’s not true. Newspapers have contributed enough to their ills on their own by a lack of imagination, inability to appeal to younger readers, and inability to function in a culture now heavily dominated by Internet news and opinion sites plus a polarized and confrontational talk radio culture that has heavily influenced the tone of American political discourse.
But it was in the Bush administration where any effort of maintaining the “fourth estate” as a cherished and respected institution was subverted.
Rosen again:
“Back e’m up, starve ‘em down and drive up their negatives” is the way I summarized this approach. In July 2003 Bush took it further when he installed in the White House briefing room a stooge figure, a pathetic character who had no power, no in-in-the-loop knowledge, no respect from key players in the Administration, no talent for improvised explanation under the lights, and no problem being made to look like an ass in front of the country, the cameras and the rest of the world.
This was Scott McClellan, at that time a Bush loyalist in the extreme sense, someone willing to surrender his self-respect to be part of the President’s team. (“I have given it my all, sir, and I’ve given you my all,” McClellan said on the day his resignation was announced, words that have a strange poignancy now.)
Now these were mere tactics; the strategy was something else entirely. Here’s the way I would put it: The Bush forces, led by Dick Cheney, thought they had an insight that cancelled out Theodore Roosevelt’s insight from 1902. And they had a view of presidential power that contradicted his. Their idea—unappreciated to this day—was to make the executive more illegible, which would increase presidential power on the model of the state trooper’s sunglasses. (He can see out but no one can see in.)
This was a major shift:
For Bush and Cheney greater opacity in government signifies the president’s unchallenged power. Don’t answer questions; it encourages people to think that you can be questioned. Give up on persuasion; propaganda gets the job done more efficiently. Reason-giving only shows weakness; when the real reasons are elsewhere that shows strength.
Rosen doesn’t go into the blending of the political and talk radio cultures — but it happened under Bush.
Suddenly, it was harder for CBS, NBC, or ABC to get an exclusive interview with Bush or Cheney than Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity. Fox News and conservative talk radio became a way for the administration to by pass all those other reporters who might ask questions that actually might be tough ones…and, even worse, be followed up by tough follow-up questions. The phrase “liberal media” became a code word for “media that ask tough questions.” The word “propaganda” gets people upset — but it was just that: an effort to eschew traditional give-and-take with the mainstream press and bolster an alternate media that served as a de-facto propaganda machine.
Strategic non-communication was the best name I could come up with for this approach. It was a staggering gamble and of course it failed on every front, especially the one most important to Bush: public support for the war in Iraq.
Enter Scott McClellan, that often sweaty, seemingly hapless press secretary who often seemed as if he wasn’t even convincing himself — but now we KNOW he wasn’t:
But where his account and mine really come together is this part about the culture war: “I think the concern about liberal bias helps to explain the tendency of the Bush team to build walls against the media,” McClellan writes. Culture war concealed what was a risky and radical shift in White House communications. “Unfortunately, the press secretary at times found himself outside those walls as well.”
It wasn’t by accident. When Roosevelt welcomed the press in from the cold, he was agreeing that the modern presidency needed an interlocutor, and would benefit by having a official one on hand. It was exactly this premise that Bush and Cheney rejected, as part of a larger project, creating a more unfettered presidency all around, less accountable to other parts of the system. They wanted the lights to go out on the idea of answering questions from an unpersuaded press. They chose McClellan as the dimmer, and he was dumb enough to let them.
But I don’t think they calculated well.
And that’s part of the reason why the administration and its supporters are so angry at McClellan. They feel as former Senator Bob Dole suggested — that McClellan betrayed them.
He wasn’t supposed to leave office and write a book that made some painful observations and asked some tough questions.
But, then, the administration always had problems with painful observations and tough questions.
If it didn’t, then Scott McClellan would never be the symbol of what he was — and the way the press had been largely treated by administrations for some 100 years would have remained unchanged.
Cartoon by Adam Zyglis, The Buffalo News
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.