All Blog Posts from Public Eye

It's Friday -- which is the day after Thursday -- and that means it's time for us to continue the Public Eye Chat we began yesterday (discussing Vatican media protocol, among other things) with CBS News London Correspondent Richard Roth.

Matthew Felling: As for the events of the last week, were there any surprises or difficulties that popped up in covering the bombing attempts?

Richard Roth: There’s always difficulty here in the lack of information released once the criminal process is underway. For example, when the police tell you that someone’s arrested – I’m on one of the alert systems that the Metropolitan Police have – here’s the kind of detail you get: “We’ve arrested A, B and C” is what the e-mail says. They may have ages, towns where the arrests took place. But there’ll be nothing more than that. Slowly, some of the information may filter out, but on an official level, they’re so careful and so concerned about pre-trial publicity that could influence the criminal justice process that there’s very little specific information that comes out. That’s what you see unfolding in this story. There’s going to be a lot [of media coverage] about this that I’ll bet will either be wrong in substance or wrong in small details by the time this procedure is over. That’s always a frustration.

I was only on this story on Friday, when it was very quickly developing in terms of what had actually happened. But it was essentially the same frustrations all journalists feel who want to get facts and get enough of them right in a story that’s breaking fast.

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“The fear of missing out means today’s media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits. But no one dares miss out.”

--Outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a speech at the London offices of Reuters, as quoted by the New York Times.

More Blair: "The media are facing a hugely more intense form of competition than anything they have ever experienced before. They are not the masters of this change but its victims. The result is a media that increasingly and to a dangerous degree is driven by ‘impact.’ Impact is what matters. It is all that can distinguish, can rise above the clamor, can get noticed. Impact gives competitive edge. Of course, the accuracy of a story counts. But it is secondary to impact.”

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.

So you’ve got a few questions for Tony Blair, do you? You’re in luck, The Los Angeles Times is hopping on the reader interactivity bandwagon and asking for your questions for the British prime minister when he “goes toe-to-toe with Times editors next week.” E-mail them in to the Times by today and they’ll pick their favorite to submit to Blair.

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Sure, a ton of ink has been spilled in medialand about President Bush uttering an expletive during what he thought was a private conversation with Tony Blair. But gone largely unnoticed has been the British press' reaction to the exchange: News outlets across the pond are pointing to the conversation – in which Bush at one point said "Yo, Blair" – as evidence that, contrary to Blair's claims, the relationship between the leaders is not one of equals. Reuters has the details:

The British media pored over the text of the conversation, saying it cast Blair in a subservient role and showed the unequal nature of Britain's much-vaunted "special relationship" with the United States.

"Yo, Bush! Start treating our prime minister with respect," the popular tabloid Daily Mirror said, joining others in seeing the U.S. president's greeting as disrespectful.

The broadcast chat "reinforces the damaging public image of Blair as the U.S. president's poodle," it said.

Wrote the Guardian: "[Blair] sounds less like the head of a sovereign government than a Bush official, waiting for the boss's green light -- which he does not give."

The British press' reaction once again underscores how desperate journalists are for what they consider real news – the kind that hasn't gone through a PR filter. It seems to me that you can't extrapolate all that much from the informality exhibited in a conversation between two men who have known each other for years, a conversation that they thought was just between them. But it appears that because journalists feel so stage managed, they dissect these rare glimpses at an honest exchange down to the smallest detail. And, perhaps, come to out-of-proportion conclusions. If the members of the press felt that they had more access to the reality behind the curtain, they might not be so quick to draw such grand conclusions from such scant evidence.

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CBS White House Correspondent Mark Knoller has been thinking about President Bush’s last press conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, where the two leaders offered up some rare regret for a few of the things that have been said over the past several years when it comes to the war in Iraq and the war on terror. Knoller weighs in on PE with his take on how hot rhetoric usually has a short shelf life:

Did President Bush really mean it the other evening - when he expressed regret for some expressions of verbal bravado in recent years?

At his joint news conference Thursday with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the two leaders were asked “which missteps and mistakes” about Iraq do they most regret? Mr. Bush was quick to respond. “Saying ‘bring it on,’ kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people.”

He also cited the time he said he wanted Osama bin-Laden “dead or alive.”

“I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner,” said Mr. Bush.

But there’s no question he meant those words when he first spoke them. Look at those comments in their original context. During a visit to the Pentagon six days after the attacks of 9/11, a reporter asked the President if he wanted bin-Laden dead?

The President: I want him held --I want justice. There's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, ''Wanted: Dead or Alive.”

The reporter tried to get Mr. Bush to elaborate – as recorded by the official White House transcript:

Q: Are you saying you want him dead or alive, sir? Can I interpret …

The President: I just remember -- all I'm doing is remembering -- when I was a kid, I remember that they used to put out there in the Old West, a wanted poster. It said, ''Wanted: Dead or Alive.'' All I want and America wants him brought to justice. That's what we want.

It was a great quote from Pres. Bush – though the reporter was clearly leading the witness. And it was a response to another reporter’s question two years later that elicited the other remark Mr. Bush says he now regrets.

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