After watching yesterday’s press conference, I’m thinking the DC Press Corpse needs to suffer and cry for a longer time. In fact, I think the Biden administration should start fucking with them. For example, have a press conference but invite 20 TV, radio and print reporters from across the nation to participate virtually. No DC press allowed. Or, more town halls and fewer press conferences. Whatever makes them squeal the loudest and longest is just A-OK with me.
Speaking of people who should suffer and cry, the bluebird in my heart is singing at the news that Dominion is suing Fox for $1.6 billion. Whether or not this hurts Fox in the long run, it should offer some short-term amusement.
Josie
I would prefer to see townhalls, in which citizens could ask questions, rather than reporters. Reporters could attend in order to report on what is said, but the questions should come from people who are most affected by the policies. In the past, citizen questions have been better than reporters’ or moderators’ questions.
Boris Rasputin (the evil twin)
Tell the Faux Spews people they’re “infotainment” at best, and should send a news reporter next time while showing them the door. If any of them complain, remind them a judge ruled that Tucker Carlson is not a reliable news source
What, segundo? That calls for a drink
dmsilev
Yeah, if you have to have reporters, make them local reporters. I think the nadir of yesterday’s event was when the national press asked Biden (a) are you going to run in 2024, (b) Will Harris remain your running mate and (c) Will T**** be your opponent. (a) is an an inane but vaguely legitimate question to ask. There’s only one remotely plausible answer Biden will give to (b) so asking it is a waste of time. And (c) is not something he can either predict or have any control over, so it’s so massively idiotic that in a just world asking it would get the reporter’s credentials yanked.
evap
a Kirsty MacColl reference! You made my day, mistermix.
Betty Cracker
I like the idea of doing press conferences with local reporters rather than the highly paid Beltway infotainment crews. Local beat reporters know what’s happening in their regions and what the people in their states care about. Maybe scatter in some townhalls too, but frankly, I haven’t been all that impressed by most of the questions our fellow citizens ask either.
The Moar You Know
Degree of harm will depend on how much of that their insurers end up on the hook for it. This needs to actually go to trial and if Dominion wins, even partially, Fox News will look a lot different in the future as their insurers will dictate their programming, not Rupert and Lachlan
If Rupert/Lachlan win or worse, just pay them off, nothing changes.
Omnes Omnibus
@evap: Smiths.
PJ
@Omnes Omnibus: both, but you knew that
Jeffro
I think the President should speak with them every 64 days (or whatever it was) like clockwork, not a day earlier or later.
And not call on Fox News ever, either.
In other words, keep doing what they’re doing and ignore the snooze media.
On a related side note: my FB-addled mom has been reduced to complaining that President Biden…held the news conference in the afternoon. That’s it. As if that was a sign of the Apocalypse. LOL.
Parfigliano
Id be very happy if Biden never asked a Fox person for their question. Let them attend and shut them out. The howling would be epic.
Omnes Omnibus
@PJ: Sure, but when someone quotes “Smooth Criminal,” is it really right to say that it was a cool Alien Ant Farm reference?
The Moar You Know
Yesterday the press showed their asses for all to see. Not one question about COVID. NOT ONE. If they were doctors that’d be malpractice. Not one about COVID relief. Not one about the economy. Boot that entire pool out and pick citizens at random. They won’t do worse and frankly will probably do a lot better. This unelected group of idiots are a large part of the reason we got Predecessor in the first place and why nothing gets done in DC. Biden can’t control who the Senate or House talks to, but he can control who gets to ask him questions and I would humbly suggest that he start doing so forcefully.
WereBear
For the longest time we’ve been in the boxing ring with one hand behind our back and a crooked ref and stooges in the seats.
It takes pulling down the whole building to expose that much corruption. And COVID-19 COMBINED with the utterly disgusting non-response AND the outright leveraging of American disease and deaths for MONEY…
We had our earthquake and fire. Now we can at least rebuild. And we must.
Spanky
I’m waiting for the Fox defense of “we’re just entertainment”. No more White House press credentials for you!
Jeffro
I like this idea a LOT.
As long as Jen Psaki does a brief intro as to why this change was necessary…. ;)
Omnes Omnibus
@Spanky: Can’t have it both ways, right?
Jeffro
I like this a lot also! I hope the WH pounces at the first opportunity.
JMG
Local reporters and beat-specific national reporters (who seldom get within miles of the White House) are better informed than their Beltway peers and hence would ask genuinely more difficult questions of Biden. Considering how easily he dominated yesterday’s press conference, he’d have to be nuts to switch from the usual White House crew.
Shakti
That’s a good idea because hedge fund newspaper consolidation and the pandemic has decimated local newspapers.
I think my hometown paper is virtual now. My local paper only prints news maybe two or three times a week. Even before the pandemic I’d see a lot of news stories that were just reprints of the larger paper stories and it wasn’t just AP and Reuters.
Spin it as promoting journalism and a free press which is essential to our democracy.
Xentik
I rather like the idea of having both town halls with citizens asking questions and giving press conferences which include local journalists from across the country virtually. I think having the latter and calling on a mixture of both WH Press Corpse members along with real journalists will make the dysfunction and incompetence of the WHPC even more visible.
After yesterday, there should be zero press conferences which include only the WHPC going forward. They’re the journalistic equivalent of a dog that just figured out autofellatio.
zhena gogolia
@JMG: I think Froomkin made this point yesterday, that there could be legitimately uncomfortable questions you could ask him, but these weren’t them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Shakti: Democratizing the press corps.
Roger Moore
It’s very important that it hurt them a lot. They need to get the message that spreading Republican disinformation comes at a painful cost.
jonas
@dmsilev:
I believe it was Kaitlan Collins of CNN who asked that brilliant zinger. They wait months — supposedly on tenterhooks! — for Biden to hold one of these sacred press conferences, and then ask bozo questions like these? Followed by Daniel Dale breathlessly getting to “fact check” Biden over his claim that “most” migrants being detained at the border are sent back across, when it was actually something like 40%. Start the impeachment proceedings! I guess that’s a step up from “of the 86 explicit lies he told today, the 22 most egregious were…” that used to constitute Dale’s job with TFG, but still. C’mon.
Chat Noir
The Pod Save America guys recently had a segment where they recited a question and had to guess whether it was a question from a regular citizen in a town hall setting or from a White House reporter. The quality of the question, natch, was way better when a citizen asked it.
laura
For all the non-stop pissing and moaning about the MOST IMPORTANT ISSUE EVAH – the unreasonable delay in holding a presser, the press sure covered themselves in glory. I have no idea at all about how to express to the assembled gaggle that they are an embarrassing time waste with zero added value. Time that can never be made up – just gone to waste. tfg would have taken several messy wet verbal dumps and huffed off stage left and there’d be endless coverage parsing over the moment he became president and one or two “White House correspondents” would have tut tutted about how they were treated and not one word about the lying crazy madman. I’ll leave it to Jay Rosen Ms.’ Petri and Rubin and the twitterati to sum up what we can expect the fourth estate to focus it’s high dudgeon next.
Another Scott
@Josie: A problem with town halls is that the screeners for the networks want to highlight American Unicorns who are vaguely concerned about something, or that one person out there who is negatively affected by clean air and water, or that one person out there who, 35 years ago, had a bad interaction with the president… In other words, more gotcha TV and more Democrats are Doing It Wrong.
I don’t know how one guards against that, and agree that it’s usually better than the White House press conferences (at least the bad questions that get all the attention).
tl;dr – beware the gate keepers.
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@The Moar You Know:
Or boot the dedicated Washington press corps and invite reporters from other beats. I bet if you brought in a bunch of reporters from the rest of the paper, they’d ask interesting, relevant questions related to the stuff they normally cover. Crime reporters would ask questions about crime and policing, business reporters would ask questions about the economy, science reporters would ask questions about climate policy, and so on. They would know it was their one chance to learn something and make the most of it, rather than trying an endless game of gotcha.
Kathleen
@Roger Moore: Agree. Though Fox is not the only propatainment outlet that wilfully signal boosts Russian – er Republican misinformation.
jonas
Vastly better. Regular people are interested in how government affects them. White House reporters are interested 1. in the sounds of their own voices, and 2. stuff that will get clicks on their Twitter feed.
Shakti
@Shakti:
Of course, it would be difficult to find newspapers owned not by a right wing crank or a hedge fund so the rotating group of stringers would be small and select.
One of the things I’ve noticed is sometimes right wingers will pay to put up local sounding news sites but if you look at who owns them and what they cover you’ll find no local news whatsoever.
Roger Moore
@JMG:
I think this shows how backward our view of the whole process is. The goal isn’t to see who wins, the President or the news media. It’s for the President to answer interesting questions so the public becomes better informed. It’s the winner/loser framing that makes these things so awful.
Cheryl Rofer
Saw a suggestion on Twitter yesterday that beat reporters be invited so that they could ask more knowledgeable questions
ETA: I see Roger Moore has already made this suggestion. I’m all for having a different group of questioners at each press conference – beat reporters, citizens, special interest groups, etc.
Roger Moore
@Kathleen:
Nor are they the only “news” outlet Dominion has either sued or threatened to sue.
evap
@Omnes Omnibus: Kirsty covered it, I was thinking that she wrote it. So, never mind….
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Every President since GW Bush has treated them as trash. I don’t think suffering will work because the status of having that White House pass is what these reporters want, so they will tolerate any amount of humiliation for it. I think, as other have mentioned, giving different groups access to the president the solution, since it diminishes the star quality of being in the White House among the media.
Betsy
Mistermix, this is a really, really good idea. The Administration could even say “We will have a press conference and will invite members of the press from all over the country” and reserve, say, two spots for the DC press, or some proportionate number in relation to the rest of the country’s population.
And then the DC press could decide how bad they want to look among their peers from states and cities around the country.
They would be right there in the room, with their swill questions, while other correspondents from around the country asked questions of real importance to real people in their locality.
The DC press also couldn’t whine about being excluded — it would just be proportional.
Well, of course they will whine, but it would look really stupid and they would lose face with real journalists not in the Swamp / Church of High Broderism.
Just Chuck
@Shakti: Most cities have an indie weekly. But hell, the bluehairs that make up my neighborhood association would probably have better questions. In fact I’m pretty sure if you just chose people off the street at random that there would have been a good chance that at least one of them might have asked a COVID-related question, or less inane than “will you be running against T in 2024”?
lofgren
If they are already asking if Biden is running in 2024, that suggests to me that they really don’t need another press conference until 2024, as apparently there are no pressing issues to think about until then.
SiubhanDuinne
@Spanky:
Yup. They’re a news organisation when they want WH press credentials, but they’re just an entertainment outfit when they want to dodge responsibility for something they’ve said.
Slightly reminds me of the way Cheney would point to his position as a member of the GWB administration when he wanted to leverage executive privilege/authority, but claimed to be a member of the legislative branch in his role as President of the Senate when he wanted to lean on lawmakers to pass (or kill) a particular nominee or bill.
MattF
I once knew a reporter who worked in the WH (Clinton) press corps. He was the goto guy for conventional wisdom on any subject. I once asked him why the Clintons were so despised— he just shrugged. Didn’t know, didn’t care. It’s really all about status and professional advancement— if you actually care about politics, you’re a fool.
Roger Moore
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Yep. If you really want to accomplish something, you need to convince their employers that they’re doing a bad job. As long as the media sees their DC reporters as glorified gossip columnists, the situation won’t get better.
citizen dave
@Just Chuck: I’m for random people or citizens. I don’t have nearly the confidence in local media some of the rest of you do. Our tv channels have all but given up on serious political reporting and/or knowledge-based reporting. There are some sharp ones scattered about, so maybe those would work.
Our weekly alternative paper went belly up.
Maybe take it off tv. Might be interesting to do it on radio and/or web-only.
JMG
It’s important to understand just how reporters, especially TV news reporters, get assigned the White House beat in the first place. The majority of them were promoted because they covered the winning campaign in the previous election (that’s how Haberman got the assignment in 2017, and why she has an exceedingly vague role at the Times today). In other words, they are campaign reporters with limited experience covering government, but who zealously stay on top of any Permanent Campaign news. The logic is that these reporters have all kinds of sources from the previous campaign, and to an extent I’m sure that’s true, but it also makes them poorly suited to the oft-mundane chores of overseeing government functioning or lack of same.
Old School
I’m not convinced inviting local TV, radio, and print reporters would eliminate inane questions.
Barbara
Maybe Biden or Psaki should ask the White House press corps when and why they became so obsessed with playing Trivial Pursuits.
Hoodie
I wouldn’t waste my time fucking with them. Nothing wrong with having more interviews with regional reporters and more town halls, but there’s nothing particularly new to that. I think folks got a little too hopeful when you started to actually see some pushback from DC press against Trump, but that was probably a product of the network heads being generally worried about the real crises Trump was creating and his attempts to become an Erdogan-style populist strongman, which would not bode well for them. Because of that, the DC “reporters” (they’re really more like entertainers) career interests happened to temporarily align with the national interest. Now you’re seeing reversion to the mean, which entails them returning to amplifying relatively mundane conflicts to further their careers. However, you’re probably better off suffering through press conferences like yesterday’s than trying to cut them off. The questions yesterday were insipid, but Biden generally got the best of that encounter by being the nice old man and cagey pol he is and they generally came across as the ambitious, shallow Heathers they are. Rather than cut them off, you do what Biden’s folks did, make them wait and start complaining about lack of access, give them access for an hour and let them fall flat like they did yesterday.
Almost Retired
I love the theory of liability Dominion’s attorneys have posited: Fox saw its ratings tank after the election, so they manufactured a fraud theory to lure some of their malevolent simpleton viewers back. I’m paraphrasing.
Another Scott
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: +1
It’s all about status. (Similarly with the MotU chasing every dollar when they can’t possibly use what they have. They are making comparisons with their near peers, not with the average or normal people.) They grew up with the natural progression being:
There’s so much news now, everywhere and all the time, that WHCC isn’t a big deal any more. Music videos and How to Make a Frozen Princess Cake gets many, many more eyeballs. Talking head correspondents are becoming irrelevant.
It’s not about doing a good job as a reporter, it’s about impressing the boss (“get those clicks!”) and near peers (“you made him squirm! good job!!”) and moving up. They do that by generating memes with their names on them.
/cynic
Cheers,
Scott.
Barbara
@Just Chuck: Well, you kind of go back to the William Buckley quote about preferring to be ruled by a committee of the first 20 names in the Boston telephone book than a collection of carefully curated experts from Boston universities. I think the point is that it’s easy for experts or professionals to become trapped in their tunnel vision, and that is certainly true of the White House press corps, trying so hard to elicit a sound bite at the expense of developing knowledge or information about anything. OTOH, they could find out about most things through sources other than the president. So I am not actually sure what their purpose even is.
narya
@MattF: and THAT–“if you actually care about politics you’re a fool”–annoys the everloving fk out of me (and a lot of folks here at BJ, too, I think). Politics isn’t a damn game–it’s our LIVES. It is the means by which we decide how we are going to live together and take care of each other. Sometimes there’s horsetrading (that is life), but it is, or should be, about struggling toward a greater good.
Barbara
@Almost Retired: The fact that Sidney Powell has basically admitted on the record that it was all false (well, that’s my interpretation) might give Dominion a bigger opening than they realized.
Just Chuck
Give a panel of sports reporters an hour and they’ll come up with genuinely hard-hitting questions. Sports reporting is far more fact-based than most every other topic. Shame that Nate Silver didn’t keep that lesson internalized, but the overall record is still pretty good.
Frank Wilhoit
In order to talk about Fox, one must first understand that Rupert Murdoch is Alfred Harmsworth in pinchbeck and glass. If you do not know who Harmsworth (aka Northcliffe) was, you are missing essential context. Go read him up. Then you can place Fox in context and distinguish what is posturing from what is serious; then you can begin to see how the audience fails to make that distinction and what the consequences of that failure are.
MattF
@narya: Just to be clear, that’s not my view. I think politics matters.
JMG
@Just Chuck: As a former sportswriter, I can tell you what the difference is. Our readers/viewers/listeners are about 2000 times more knowledgeable about sports (many more so than the reporters, at least on some specific topics) than is the mass audience for political news. You can’t bullshit sports fans, at least not for long. You can exploit their manias, hence sports talk radio, but you can’t ignore what they care about.
Roger Moore
@JMG:
There’s no fundamental problem with appointing reporters to the WHPC based on their having reported on the campaign before. It makes sense that they’d have well-placed sources, especially when the new president is a relative outsider and brings in other outsiders. The real problem is that campaign coverage, and by extension political coverage after the campaign is over, is dominated by campaign strategy and other process stuff rather than policy. We need reporters who are going to cover the government as an important part of our country that actually affects people’s lives. Instead we get glorified gossip columnists.
narya
@MattF: :-) I DID get that drift. I think that’s what at the heart of the outrage in this and the previous post/comments.
gene108
@dmsilev:
The last point gave me the goofy idea that Trump should primary Rubio for his Senate seat. It would truly be a pass the popcorn event.
M31
Boot that entire pool out and pick citizens’ pets at random.
that would also be better
J R in WV
@Another Scott:
This would be true for townhalls set up by the entertainment networks. I think if Jen Psaki’s office set them up we could rely on even-handed questioners. Plus citizen RWNJ questioners would be pretty obvious, and easy for Joe to deal with as such.
Maybe just reserve 60% of the seats at future conferences for voters, and let them go first? One or two voters, then a reporter, then a couple more voters. Would that make the “Press reporters” look even more foolish or what?
And stop calling them “Press Conferences” and call them question sessions, or constituent meetings, or something else not related to the “Press”.
M31
reserve the same number of spots for the DC press as there are DC senators, that’d get some action
Sure Lurkalot
Well, even the tweeters I like (e.g. Aaron Rupert), jumped on TFG’s call it in to Fox, treated/tweeted/repeated it as news and thus continue to amplify the idiocy and talking points that the hapless White House press core run with. That’s a problem too.
And what happened to Jamiche Alcindor? It’s your compassion and decency that compels them! JFC.
M31
still want to see a Trump press conference with pets:
“next question, from Steve from West Virginia”
[Steve stares]
[Trump limps whimpering out of the room]
StringOnAStick
I thought about Joe’s “I don’t know if there will be a Republican party in four years” comment and now it seems like he found the least incendiary way to call them “seditious, treasonous, Putin-owned, fascist greedheads who care nothing for democracy or US citizens”.
Miss Bianca
@Old School:
Yeah? Try me.
Betsy
@JMG: Or maybe he genuinely is interested in grappling with the issues and communicating, in which case he wouldn’t be interested in dominating but in helping advance the public conversation on the issues. Even though he’s perfectly capable of dominating!
Kathleen
@Roger Moore: I did not know that! Thx for sharing that tip. I shall add that to my Google list.
gene108
@Just Chuck:
Sports reporters audience – sports fans – know far more about their teams, and their sport of interest than most people know or care to know about what our government is doing.
This is one reason national sports media, like ESPN, get dragged for their hot takes based segments.
Amir Khalid
Two thoughts:
White House press conferences and daily media briefings are pretty much the simplest most basic work a reporter does. Media outlets should assign the rookies to them; senior journalists would be better employed elsewhere, finding the stories that require legwork, a network of contacts and broad experience.
The White House should not be any journalist’s permanent beat. Rotate them in and out of there. Bring them in from other beats, reassign them out on a regular basis. That will help them maintain a perspective from outside the White House. It will also help keep them from falling into a White House press
corpsherd mentality, where they think like all the other reporters, pursue the same angles, and come up with the same stories as all the other reporters.mrmoshpotato
@Josie:
Mr. President, how many decades do we have to go back to find a GOP that isn’t a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles? (h/t driftglass)
Old School
@Miss Bianca:
I’m not saying local media would generate only inane questions. Just that it wouldn’t eliminate them. There are good questions asked by national media.
louc
@JMG: This, this, this. I work with local beat-specific reporters and there was a collective eye-roll across the beat about the stupid questions the White House press corps were asking. Basically, to get that job, you need to be good at schmoozing, not at understanding the nuances of a topic or explaining it clearly.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@JMG: That’s a useful observation
Ken
My one worry about having citizens ask the questions would be that That Guy would show up, the one who makes every city council, HOA, or PTA meeting a living hell. “Before I get to my question, I’d just like to give a little background so we’re all on the same page….”
Ken
“President Biden, what do you like on your shawarma? And are there any small jazz clubs you could recommend?”
(At least, that’s what we’d get from my local indie, which is heavily entertainment-focused.)
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
The paper would just feed them questions to ask. They want the discord, it “sells more papers.”
This countries politics is mostly about misdirection any more. Look at the press event we are discussing. Stupid gotcha questions that waste everyone’s time. Look at this post here. We know they were going to do this, the only time even a part of them ask anything reasonable was some of the questions/articles from/about shitforbrains laughable but not funny press bullshit sessions, and that after how long that he’d been in office, playing the role of fuck up/us deluxe. The WH press creates eyeballs for their employers, period. Truth and effort are not in their bag of tricks, the only job they have is the one they get paid to do, bring in eyeballs/create sellable “news.”
The movie version/idealization of the press has rarely ever existed, those reporters do not work for us, not in any way, shape or form. They work for a paycheck, at a business that is in the business of being profitable at producing eyeballs, nothing more, nothing less.
hitchhiker
@JMG:
thank you!
that explains a lot, and I feel like I should have figured it out ages ago.
Odie Hugh Manatee
Too bad the Press Corpse isn’t a toilet that could be flushed.
cain
@Josie: Even better – listening to real americans trash the DC corps as being out of touch. That would be fun. Make the news about them instead of Biden.
Pittsburgh Mike
Kirsty MacColl, right? How is that you know all those obscure songs?
Anyway, great reference.