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Even On The White House Beat, Reporters Are People Too

By Vaughn Ververs

June 5, 2006 / 9:40 AM EDT / CBS News

(AP)

Media watchers in Washington spend an inordinate amount of time thinking, talking and writing about the relationship between the White House and the press. The delicate dance between the government and the media is, after all, one of the great pressure points in the nation's power structure. Sometimes the confrontational exchanges between journalists and the White House are so theatrical and predictable that we have to wonder whether it's even worth having them. But watching the process more carefully provides a different perspective on how the sausage is made.

We've spent a lot of time discussing the beat with journalists at CBS News and looking at the relationship between the White House and the press in general. It's always enlightening to hear from others and yesterday's farewell dispatch from Elisabeth Bumiller of the New York Times is an interesting addition to this conversation. After nearly five years spent covering one of the more prestigious and important beats in American journalism, Bumiller is moving on, but not without giving her audience a peek inside "the bubble" that is the White House.

In doing so, Bumiller seeks to clear up some "misperceptions" about the beat – some rather obvious and some surprising. It's definitely worth a read but what I found most revealing was her take on the often-repeated mantra that "White House reporters are ideological." It might surprise some to learn that reporters are just people too:

Most reporters I know are not passionately political, left or right. Our real ideology is a love of conflict, meaning that we have a bias for stories about, yes, personality feuds, but also about disputes over policy. In the White House, as in conversations over the backyard fence, what goes wrong is news.
One time I wrote that Mr. Bush dismissed an Osama bin Laden videotape at his ranch by saying "I didn't watch it at all." The actual quote was "I didn't watch it all."
I got a furious letter from a reader saying that I was trying to make Mr. Bush look bad, when in fact I was tired and had typed the quotation from a transcript without my reading glasses in a dingy Waco, Tex., hotel room.