All Blog Posts from Public Eye

Stephen Colbert, like savoir faire, is everywhere.

It’s no news that the host of “The Colbert Report” is running for President. It’s been the talk of the political world and blogosphere ever since he announced two weeks ago.

But today’s New York Times piece got me wondering. Former TVNewser Brian Stelter wrote:

Stephen Colbert’s presidential candidacy may be phony, but his supporters are very real…

One of them — a group created by Raj Vachhani and titled “1,000,000 Strong for Stephen T Colbert” — has grown to more than a million members in just over a week, making it the most popular political group on Facebook by far.

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In his continuous quest to avoid the mainstream media filter, President Bush sat down last week with 10 influential military bloggers last Friday to discuss the war in Iraq and his decision to implement General Petraeus' suggestions. According to the Washington Post's report of the session:

[T]he hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely.
"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.
Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote.

(Note to readers scoring at home: Bush was the first president to meet with bloggers. So if you had James K. Polk in the president/blogger pool, bad news.)

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In his continuous quest to avoid the mainstream media filter, President Bush sat down last week with 10 influential military bloggers last Friday to discuss the war in Iraq and his decision to implement General Petraeus' suggestions. According to the Washington Post's report of the session:

[T]he hour-long meeting in the Roosevelt Room offered Bush another opportunity to break through what he sees as the filter of the traditional news media, while also reaching out to the providers of a new source of information for soldiers, their families and others who follow the conflict in Iraq closely.

"More and more we are engaging in the new-media world, and these are influential people who have a big following," said Kevin F. Sullivan, the White House communications chief.

Bush told the group that, to his knowledge, it was the first time a president had met with bloggers for a chat at the White House, one of the participants wrote.

(Note to readers scoring at home: Bush was the first president to meet with bloggers. So if you had James K. Polk in the president/blogger pool, bad news.)

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So …it’s the Tuesday after Labor Day, and we scrammed early last week.

Did we miss anything?

I mean, aside from Bush's surprise visit to Iraq and Katie’s Baghdad trip (more on that later) and the no-hitter and Senator Craig’s post-dated resignation – well, you may have seen us discuss it on “Reliable Sources” this past weekend – and Appalachian State and Hurricane Felix and that new book on President Bush, not to mention Jerry Lewis going all Andrew “Dice” Clay on his telethon.

Yeah, we mean aside from those things.

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CBS White House Correspondent Mark Knoller missed a Bush press conference earlier this month. In this dispatch he shares/vents other frustrations about the logistics of covering President Bush this past summer.

It costs CBS News a fortune to cover the President – especially when he travels. And it sure looks like it didn’t get its money’s worth this month.

Three times in recent weeks, those of us who were covering the President’s trips to Kennebunkport, Maine; Crawford, Texas; and today to Bellevue, Washington were totally out of position for the big stories of the day.

On the morning of Thursday, August 9, members of the traveling press were on the press plane en route to Maine – just as Pres. Bush was holding a formal news conference back at the White House.

We had returned to Washington three days later, but were airborne again Monday morning flying to Waco, Texas in advance of the President beginning a two-week stay at his ranch in Crawford.

So what happens, while we’re half-way to Central Texas? The president walks out to Marine One to announce the resignation of his senior advisor Karl Rove.

And again this morning, the President ends his two-week ranch stay and arrives at TSTC Airfield in Waco – to makes his first public statement on the resignation of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

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You ever notice the backdrop during some of President Bush’s speeches? The ones that say “Making America Stronger” or “A Reformer With Results?” (And yes, "Mission Accomplished.") The first time you see them, you think they might be a bit heavy-handed, but then … all those thematic messages just morph into the entire news story.

And that’s the point.

There’s an interesting new book that breaks down the study of presidential communication over the past decade-plus: “Managing the President’s Message” by Towson University professor Martha Joynt Kumar. According to today’s Washington Post quickie-review:

Kumar, a Towson University professor, got most of the important figures of the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush presidencies to talk with her about their strategies for spinning journalists -- including Karl Rove, Dan Bartlett and Joshua B. Bolten from this administration. What emerges is a portrait of a rapidly shifting environment in which the White House has had to adapt to keep a quicker pace because of cable news, talk radio and the Internet.

Nothing is left to chance, she writes. Take the backgrounds during President Bush's speeches, which the White House makes sure are plastered with slogans so that the television shot conveys the chosen message even without sound. Bush, she reports, speaks from a special podium called "Falcon," designed so that it does not block the background message in televised close-ups. "Winning the picture is important," Rove told her.

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"The relationship between the President and the press is a unique relationship, and it's a necessary relationship. I enjoy it. I hope you do. As I say, sometimes you don't like the decisions I make, and sometimes I don't like the way you write about the decisions. But nevertheless, it's a really important part of our process."

-- President Bush, at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the new briefing room this morning, befriending the filter.

I’ve got to admit I was stunned by the nature, depth and fury of the responses to my blog post yesterday about the Bill Moyers Journal report on the news media and the War in Iraq.

Read those comments and you’ll see there’s alot of anger, no, make that rage directed at some of us – maybe all of us – in the news business.

In fairness, some of you had legitimate points of view to express. Fair enough. Others just wanted to tell me I was a jerk or worse. One of you even called me something that got Don Imus fired.

Sorry you feel that way.

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Here's Howard Kurtz on Scott Pelley's interview with President Bush:

"I thought it was a reasonably tough interview by Scott Pelley. What you have to understand is that no matter how probing the questions are -- and I've watched Bush be interviewed by everyone from Tim Russert to Oprah -- a disciplined politician can limit himself to saying exactly what he wants to say and no more. So I don't think the 60 Minutes segment broke much new ground, except perhaps to show Bush being rather dismissive toward the notion that Congress could cut off funding for the war."

For what it's worth, I thought both Pelley and Bush were pretty good. Pelley was fair but didn't shy away from pressing the president, and Bush appeared straightforward and largely stayed on message. (Not that the right and left didn't have their quibbles.) It's worth noting that the president continues to reach out to organizations like CBS News, the network, of course, responsible for "memogate" and one of the principal players in a mainstream media that many conservatives have dismissed as biased and unfair.

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This morning, Associate Producer Josh Gross was among the reporters gathered into a gymnasium-like press facility about 5-10 minutes from the Camp David. They were sitting at their computers waiting for the president’s scheduled teleconference from Camp David with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad. At around 9 a.m., a one-line Reuters report came across the wires saying that Iraq television was reporting that President Bush had arrived in Baghdad. One reporter read the report aloud, asking if anyone else had seen it. “We all turned to our wire reports … and we were all looking at each other in befuddlement,” said Gross. “We didn’t know if we should believe it or not.” Some thought there was a mix-up in the translation from Iraqi television. With that everyone got on the phones, trying to confirm it themselves, said Gross. “I started calling everyone on the White House staff, they didn’t know anything.” No luck at the press office either.

Eventually, said Gross, “it started to trickle out that [the president] had snuck out last night, and nobody knew,” including, as it turns out, several cabinet members gathered at Camp David. ”We all sat around in disbelief, trading stories and parsing everything that had been said yesterday.” Gross noted that President Bush had mentioned yesterday he was looking forward to today’s teleconference, “I guess he just didn’t indicate where he would be during it,” he joked.

It isn’t rare for reporters to be called to cover an event with initial secrecy, said Gross, but his own similar experience offered a bit more advance information. In 2004, Gross was recruited to cover Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s surprise trip to Iraq to visit troops over the Christmas holiday. The CBS Washington bureau got a call on Monday night that the network should send a reporter and a crew to Andrews Air Force Base on Wednesday. They were provided with indications of what the weather would be like so they would know what to pack, and that was about it, said Gross. “So we knew there was a trip coming and people were of course speculating about it.” Once the plane landed on the ground in Iraq, “They said, ‘we’re here, you can tell people where we are,’” said Gross. “But we weren’t allowed to say where we were headed next. Once we landed in the next city, we were able to report what had already happened.” Gross guesses that those reporters currently traveling with the president are experiencing the same thing, “They probably know what’s happening next … they just have information that they can’t reveal yet.”

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