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Picking The New White House Press Secretary

By Brian Montopoli

April 20, 2006 / 12:23 PM EDT / CBS News

(AP)

Slate's John Dickerson has three suggestions for the White House in its search for a new press secretary to replace Scott McClellan. He's gone 1 for 3. Let's start with the base hit: Dickerson quite rightly says the White House should install someone who doesn't lie to the press. It wasn't always McClellan's fault when he lied – Karl Rove and Scooter Libby left McClellan out to dry by telling him they were not involved in the Valerie Plame leak, which he subsequently told the press – but when the press secretary is shown to be lying, it doesn't do much for his credibility. And a press secretary without credibility has an awfully hard time controlling a story.

But it's worth looking closely at Dickerson's other suggestions. He claims that "[t]he new press secretary needs not only to be in the room when the decisions are being made, but he needs to be empowered to talk about what he's seen." In theory that's great – transparency is our guiding principal, after all – and there's certainly something to giving the press secretary enough access so that he or she knows, for example, when Scooter's not telling him the truth. But it would be political suicide for any White House to empower a press secretary to offer too much candor about "what he's seen."

Let's turn it around – does the press corps offer up its own secrets so readily? Does it tell the government the identities of the anonymous sources it sometimes relies on or reporters' personal feelings about the people they cover? Of course not, because journalists have reason to keep some secrets. The same goes for the government. The government may sometimes overreach in defining what it can justifiably keep secret – a tendency that the journalists are empowered to try to correct – but it would be foolish to simply throw the doors open and expose every mistake or instance of internal strife. If Dickerson simply wants more candor, I'm with him. But an all access pass? The press corps might want to take a good long look in the mirror before making such a request.

Dickerson's other suggestion is that the White House hire a journalist to do the job. That's not a new idea – as Dickerson points out, the Kennedy, Johnson, Ford, and Reagan administrations all did it. But it's one that I have trouble with. The Washington press corps already has an uncomfortably close relationship with the people it covers, hobnobbing with them at events like the White House Correspondents Dinner, in which journalists and government officials laugh it up in black-tie attire as though they're playing an adversarial game but are ultimately all members of the same privileged club.

Dickerson writes that anyone "who's worked in a newsroom…will understand the rhythms and demands of the press corps. White House officials would be able to stop guessing at what motivates the press and ask someone who might actually know." There's something to that. I can certainly see why it makes sense for the White House to install a journalist in the position – in addition to the above reasons, it also will likely make the relationship that much less adversarial. But is that really something journalists want to encourage? The beltway is already insular and incestuous enough. Reporters should do everything they can to keep their distance, and with it their perspective. Having a fellow journalist occupying the podium abdicated by McClellan could further muddy the boundaries between the two sides. The relationship between press and administration shouldn't be needlessly adversarial, but the opposite may well be even worse.