All Blog Posts from Public Eye

CBS White House Correspondent Mark Knoller offers his assessment of President Bush's press conference this morning – and talks about why he wasn't there…

Talk about being out of pocket.

You probably didn’t notice, but one part of the White House Press Corps wasn’t able to attend the President’s news conference this morning.

At the time, we were aboard the White House press plane en route to Kennebunkport, Maine where Pres. Bush is now spending a long weekend.

So instead of attending the hastily announced Q-&-A session in the White House briefing room where I should have been and otherwise would have been, I watched it from 39,000 feet aboard the chartered jetBlue Airbus A320 that served as the press plane on this trip. On that aircraft, passengers can watch a number of broadcast and cable channels downlinked from the DIRECTV satellite.

But it was a frustrating experience. When the White House put out the word at about 9:00 this morning, I was sitting in the press waiting area at Andrews Air Force Base.

When I left the White House last evening, the only event on the President’s schedule for today was his departure via Marine One at 12:15PM.

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White House Correspondent Mark Knoller has a behind-the-scenes report from the new White House Briefing Room…

In a ceremony more closely associated with supermarket openings, President Bush this morning cut a red, white and blue ribbon to inaugurate the newly renovated White House Briefing Room.

The event also marked the return to the West Wing of the White House press corps – ending an 11-month exile in a conference center across the street and down the block.

“Welcome back,” said the President – adding a little needle to his greeting, “We missed you -- sort of.”

He spoke from a brand new, high-tech podium.

Gone is the simple blue-curtain backdrop.

It now looks like something from the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise.

It’s got stage lighting, rotating panels and two 45-inch video screens on which the White House can display charts, graphs, logos or commutation announcements.

The room has new furniture, carpeting and marble slabs on the wall. It smells like a new car – though press rooms have a way of quickly taking on the aroma of its occupants.

Members of the press now sit in new theater-like seats that we’re told are an inch wider than they used to be - perhaps in the belief that reporters are too.

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Dirty little secret time here -- along the lines of "You know you're a redneck if … "

You know it's summertime journalism if ….

... You begin to notice The Attack of The Lists. They come with the territory, like suntan lotion, "Die Hard" movies and boat drinks. They're fun and ever-so-slightly informative … but mostly serve as conversation starters. Are they a crutch of sorts for reporters and columnists? Absolutely. But a completely understandable one given the glacial pace of the June-July-August news cycles. (What, you'd prefer another "Summer of the Shark?")

This summer is shaping up true to form.

See, it begins innocuously enough with a Big List, maybe even on national TV – like last week, when the American Film Institute named its "Top 100 Films of All Time." This big splash opens the season and gives everybody cover.

Then a big name magazine gets into the act, as Forbes has done today with its list of the "Celebrity 100" list of who in showbiz has the most capital, financial or otherwise. (No shock here, but Oprah is still on top.)

Then you move inside the newspaper to a list about "Our Favorite Magazines," as the Chicago Tribune did today. (Though it's nearly impossible to have a problem with any list that gives props to "The Believer.")

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360 credentialed journalists covered last night's Republican presidential debate, according to an "on-site news insider" cited by TVNewser. One of them was CBSNews.com Senior Political Editor (and former Public Eye editor) Vaughn Ververs. Ververs spoke with Public Eye this morning about the scene inside the press tent.

"It's a pretty workmanlike atmosphere, frankly, as the debate is going on," said Ververs. Most reporters don't talk during the debate, he said, though "once in a while" someone cracks a joke. I asked Ververs if pack journalism was an issue in a setting like that. (Pack journalism is journalism that becomes homogenous as reporters talk to each other and share ideas, draining their coverage of original thought.)

"I think journalists do speak to one another, and everyone sort of shares their general observations," said Ververs. "But on the other hand, we all want to provide the smartest analyses, the newsiest news, and we're not going to scoop ourselves on these things, so the comments are pretty general in nature."

I also asked Ververs why reporters needed to make the trip down to South Carolina when they could have simply watched the debate on television.

"There are definitely advantages of being at the location of these events," he said. "It's not so much the debate itself. It's everything surrounding it. You can see the body language of the campaigns. You have the ability to interact with them on one-on-one basis. It's the access you get to these guys. Even if all you're getting is spin in the spin room, you can read the body language, absorb the atmosphere."

All of the candidates came through the spin room, which is usually filled with each candidate's staffers and boosters, in order to make an appearance on Fox News' "Hannity & Colmes," which had set up in the area. But not all of them stayed to talk to reporters. Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, Tom Tancredo, and Jim Gilmore were among those who did.

"Just like at the Democratic debate, it's the lesser known candidates who usually linger," said Ververs. "The ones who don't have a large staff."

You can read Ververs' debate analysis here.

We asked CBS News Correspondent Barry Petersen what covering China is like under the new rules put in place for foreign journalists in the run-up to the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics. Read his report below. The accompanying photograph is a shot of local officials questioning the CBS News team. Pictured left to right: The provincial press office official, who did the questioning; Asia Producer Marsha Cooke; Petersen; and a uniformed policeman, who was there to add official presence and said nothing.

Article 6: To interview organizations or individuals in China, foreign journalists need only obtain their prior consent.

--From the “Regulations on Reporting Activities in China by Foreign Journalists During the Beijing Olympic Games and Preparatory Period” taking effect on 1 January 2007 and expire on 17 October 2008, a Decree of the State Council

Next time, you are involved in a ''misunderstanding'' with police, cite this article and say it was signed by Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

--From a piece written by Jonathan Watts for the newsletter of the Foreign Correspondent’s Club of China.

Welcome to a brave new world of journalism in China for foreign correspondents.

In the old days, before we could go anywhere outside Beijing, we needed permission from the receiving provincial press office, and they would check with the Beijing press office of the Foreign Ministry.

Anything controversial -- and half the time things that were not -- got turned down. Too busy, wrong time, no one available to help you. Go without permission and they could and would turn us around and put us back on a plane to Beijing.

Newspaper reporters could sometimes get away with travel, but TV crews are a lot more obvious. We need pictures to tell our stories, and that means a camera and that means we get spotted fast.

Now, in these new days, the word has spread: leave the foreign journalists alone, they do not need permission to be where they are.

Example: we just traveled to a couple of tiny villages in Sichuan Province without asking or telling any officials. People there are angry because a hydro-electric dam will soon be completed, and when it blocks the river and forms a reservoir, large parts of their towns will be under water.

People in one village claimed that local officials were cheating them out of land and not paying them enough to re-locate.

These are the same local officials who once decided if we would be allowed into the area. So a few months ago we would likely have been denied permission to visit.

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It's been more than a year since we brought you inside the "Evening News" lineup meeting, and we thought it was time to do it again. The lineup meeting is where "Evening News" producers decide what stories are going to be in that day's show, and where in the show those stories will run.

Today's meeting was pretty interesting – when Executive Producer Rome Hartman walked in, he immediately called for the stock market story to be moved to the top of the show. A story on the economy had been scheduled to run after stories on Iraq and the bombing that took place near Vice President Cheney. But the market had officially begun to tank, so Hartman moved the market story to the top slot.

Click on the video box to watch the entire meeting. It's about 15 minutes long, and offers a unique insight into how the "Evening News" comes together.

If you were watching the cable news at all yesterday, you likely heard the conflicting reports regarding the health of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

Amid rumors that Talabani had suffered either a heart attack or a stroke, his son appeared on CNN at one point Sunday to say that his father did not suffer from either. By the time the "Evening News" aired last night, the broadcast was only able to report that Talabani had been flown from Baghdad to Jordan for medical treatment after falling unconscious.

Talabani's doctors today reported that rumors of a heart problem were "categorically wrong." They said that Talabani was in stable condition and recuperating from exhaustion and lung inflammation.

Phil Ittner is a CBS producer and radio reporter based in Baghdad. He explained some of the challenges in covering a story like this one, when accurate information is particularly difficult to come by.

"One of the problems with getting information from inside the Talabani camp is that they have their own agenda," said Ittner. Since Talabani's capability as a leader would be substantially affected by a potentially serious health condition, his "handlers want to politically isolate that reality from general public as long as they can."

This type of situation is certainly nothing new when reporting on governments in which there isn't much transparency, said Ittner. "Stuff like this happens all the time – Cuba is an example," he said. There, President Fidel Castro's health has been a subject of confusion for months. When Ittner covered Russia, "We all knew Yeltsin was in dire health and we were consistently misled."

So in this case, like others, that means many conflicting reports.

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Eat The Press is in eyebrows raised mode over NBC "Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams' recent interview with Men's Vogue . The source of their discontent? This excerpt from the story, which concerns network news anchors' recent off-the-record meeting with President Bush that preceded his speech on the Iraq troop surge:

"I know, I know," Brian Williams says into his low-end Motorola. "What if that ever got out?"

He's talking at a rapid clip to his NBC colleague Tim Russert, the host of Meet the Press, about the exclusive Roosevelt Room meeting they just had with President George W. Bush. This was the plan: Williams and Russert and their network peers (Gibson, Couric, Schieffer, Stephanopoulos, and others) would get the president's perspective on the troop surge he was scheduled to announce in a few hours, and no quotes would be allowed to emerge without approval. But some doozies, like the one Williams and Russert are kibitzing about, slipped out of the president's mouth. When this happened, Williams recalls, he looked around at the ashen faces of White House aides, who quickly imposed a retroactive lockdown on that tidbit, whatever it was.

And so Williams keeps the secret, despite my needling across a two-foot-long folding table that separates me from the anchor of the NBC Nightly News--he of starchy wardrobe, stiff hair, and Dudley Do-Right air--on a northbound Amtrak about an hour later. He can talk about it with Russert and anyone else who was in the room, but no one on the outside, not even his wife, Jane, herself a savvy onetime TV news producer. "I call them 'go-to-the-graves,'" Williams says, tallying about a half-dozen he maintains for Bush alone. Williams hastens to add that today's just-between-us moment was not meant to shield the president from a trifling embarrassment, but instead to preserve the United States' options for multi-front warfare.

"We're all for keeping things off the record, writes ETP, "but this strikes us as rather scary and cabal-like." Of course, we can't know how scary or cabal-like this situation actually is unless we find out what Russert and Williams were actually talking about (unlikely, given the "go-to-the-graves" remark and everything.)

Nonetheless, the debate is worth thinking about. Is it better for anchors to get briefed on information that they've agreed never to reveal than for them never to hear it at all?

What are the acceptable terms of interviews with rarely interviewed government officials? Earlier this week we took note of some comments from Gareth Butler, editor of the BBC's "The Politics Show." He wrote that a recent interview with British Prime Minister Tony Blair involved far fewer "shenanigans" from the PM's office ("you can't ask questions about this or that, you can only have x minutes, it has to be such-and-such a location") than most people assumed occurred with such rare sit-downs.

We asked Scott Pelley, who recently conducted a lengthy interview with President George W. Bush for "60 Minutes," about what the terms were – if any – for that exclusive. Pelley, who just returned from Iraq, was able to respond to us today. Here's what he told us in an e-mail:

The White House knows it cannot impose any limits on the scope of questioning. As a result, they never ask for such limits.

The limit they can, and do, impose is on time. When we did the interview at Camp David they were very strict. We had 10 minutes for the walk and talk and 20 minutes for the sit down.

In both venues, a White House staffer stood behind the president holding up time cards (5 minutes, 4 minutes, 3 minutes, etc.) so that I could see them. The time restraint is a clever way to curtail follow up questions.

Every interview with a president is, foremost, a time management game. To compensate for this, a good interviewer narrows the scope of the interview and allows himself time for follow ups. I call this going “narrow and deep.” When people ask me, “Why didn’t you ask him …?” -- that’s my answer.

After every interview with the president, I spend the next several nights, sleepless, thinking about what I should have asked.

You might say that what's a bit dry about watching the House floor on C-SPAN (other than the actual people talking) is that the cameras in place – which are operated by government employees – are limited in their scope. That means, for example, that cameras don't pan the floor for reaction shots, but offer tight shots of the lawmakers who are speaking or wide shots as votes are being called. For those behind the cameras in television news, that's particularly frustrating.

As Al Kamen notes in today's Washington Post, C-SPAN recently asked incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi if the new Congress (which she has said will be "the most honest, most open and most ethical Congress in history," Kamen notes) would consider adding more cameras to allow more liberal visual access to the chamber. C-SPAN chief Brian Lamb argued in a letter to Pelosi that the current system is "an anachronism that does a disservice to the institution and to the public."

Pelosi denied the request in a letter, writing that the current system should remain: "Under the current practice, every word spoken in an exchange between Members or between the Chair and a Member is broadcast live. This programming informs the American people and ensures an accurate historical record. It has served the American people and the House and Senate well since the advent of televised proceedings nearly 30 years ago."

After an editorial in USA Today yesterday opposed that decision, and Pelosi was invited to write an opposing view to the editorial (which she declined), her office told the paper that "she intends to meet with Lamb soon to discuss a possible compromise."

USA Today's argument in favor of greater camera access suggested that such a move could have some practical impact: "Perhaps there'd be less blatant arm-twisting and deal-making on the floor during close votes, such as the 2003 roll call on the Medicare prescription drug benefit that lasted three hours instead of the customary 15 minutes. Perhaps members would be less likely to doze or read magazines while colleagues are debating. And perhaps lawmakers would be less inclined to deliver stemwinders to empty chambers if they knew their lack of an audience would be apparent."

As for the opposing view, Donald Wolfensberger, former staff director of the House Rules Committee and current director of the Congress Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars,
argues in USA Today that Pelosi "is right to reject the request."

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