You better believe that Carl Rove was watching how Mike Murphy had Arnold bypass the hostile urban press in California and go to the voters through other media.
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October 20, 2003
WHITE HOUSE LETTER
Trying to Bypass the Good-News Filter
By ELISABETH BUMILLER NEW YORK TIMES
WASHINGTON
President Bush set off a round of mad buzzing in Washington last week when he took a pop at the national news media. "There's a sense that people in America aren't getting the truth," Mr. Bush said to a reporter for Hearst-Argyle Television, one of five back-to-back White House interviews he granted to regional broadcasters. "I'm mindful of the filter through which some news travels, and sometimes you have to go over the heads of the filter and speak directly to the people."
Mr. Bush's remarks generated newspaper articles, a report on ABC's "Nightline" and much comment about an administration that bypassed the White House press corps to push a cheery message onto local news media about the American occupation in Iraq. White House advisers readily say they consider the regional news outlets more hospitable and less judgmental, and a better place to sell their wares.
But as much as the interviews angered White House reporters, who have less access to Mr. Bush than they did to his predecessors, the tactic is nearly as old as the presidency itself. Mr. Bush may be unique only in that he so openly acknowledged what he was up to.
"This goes back at least to the 19th century," said Bruce J. Schulman, a professor of history and American studies at Boston University. "Certainly every 20th-century president has tried to go over the heads of the national media directly to the people."
Woodrow Wilson was the first president to go on a whistle-stop tour, Mr. Schulman said, in large part because he wanted to sell the League of Nations to the country, above the heads of skeptical Washington reporters. Decades later during the Vietnam War, Richard M. Nixon tried at one low point to bypass Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor and Frank Reynolds, the network anchors of the time.
"The White House was convinced that the network evening news was highly critical of the Vietnam policy," Mr. Schulman said. "So they brought these local news anchors to the White House, and let them interview the president there, and not surprisingly they tended to be much less critical and confrontational than the network reporters were. But the reason that the war was going badly was that the policy wasn't working. The unfavorable news coverage wasn't inaccurate."
This time around with Mr. Bush, it is unclear just how acquiescent the regional reporters were. Transcripts of the interviews show plenty of questions about Americans dying in Baghdad, undiscovered chemical and biological weapons and who is in control of the administration's Iraq policy. "The person who is in charge is me," Mr. Bush memorably responded to Tribune Broadcasting, uttering one of the keeper quotations of the year. The other interviews were granted to Cox Broadcasting, Sinclair Television and the Washington office of the Texas-based Belo Corporation.
"We didn't get any recipes for chili," said Fred Young, the senior vice president of news for Hearst-Argyle Television, who said he was offended by the Washington talk that regional reporters were pushovers. "That wasn't our mission."
One notable exception: The Chicago-based Tribune Broadcasting threw Mr. Bush a hometown warm-up question about the prospects of the Cubs in the playoffs. "They've got two good young arms," Mr. Bush, a former baseball team owner, replied.
Jody Powell, Jimmy Carter's White House press secretary, said that, he, too, reached out to the local news media through regional news conferences, which he said produced broader questions than those the president got inside the Beltway.
"The White House press corps is operating from a base of knowledge that doesn't extend to the rest of the country, and they're incrementally trying to move the ball along," Mr. Powell said. "The average person gets sort of lost in that."
But Michael K. Deaver, Ronald Reagan's image maker, said that his attempt to cozy up to the regional news media met with mixed success. "In many ways, they were tougher," Mr. Deaver said. "The problem was, you always had some young reporter out there who was trying to get a Pulitzer or make a name for himself."
(It was, after all, a local television reporter, Andy Hiller of WHDH-TV in Boston, who socked Mr. Bush in an interview during the 2000 presidential campaign by asking him to name the top person in power in Taiwan, India, Pakistan and Chechnya. Mr. Bush's failure of the pop quiz fueled perceptions that he knew little of foreign affairs.)
By the end of the week, Mr. Bush's image makers, who have been frustrated that their good-news story about Iraq is not getting out, pronounced themselves pleased with the results of the interviews, which had a potential audience of about 10 million Americans. Mr. Bush told Belo, for example, that "there's been tremendous progress since Saddam Hussein fell, and we shouldn't make light of the fact that the hospital system is up and running and doing very well, or schools."
As Suzy DeFrancis, the White House deputy communications director, put it: "We build 10 bridges, but the news is about the one that blew up." Now, she said, "I think we're beginning to get the story out."
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