(U-WIRE) NEW YORK – The most domestically unfortunate news that came out of the White House last week involved neither tax cuts nor campaign finance reform, but rather Press Secretary Ari Fleischer’s somewhat overlooked announcement that President Bush has decided not to hold formal news conferences.
Instead, the President will “be accessible” to the press during his public appearances and meetings with world leaders.
While some regular critics of the new administration rush to point to this as yet another move done to protect a president ill at ease with eloquent phrases and spontaneous thought, in actuality, this is the continuation of a long trend of presidents becoming less and less accessible to the press in formal settings, and yet another victory for media imagery over newsworthy substance.
According to Fleischer, the President thinks that the American people “don’t really care a whit” about whether he addresses the press in a formal or informal manner.
While it may be true that the public at large has no definitive opinion on the manner in which the president deals with the press, the president’s maneuver has everything to do with how he talks to the populace.
A president removing himself from formal televised press conferences is not simply bad news for the correspondents up against tight deadlines and cranky editors, but also for the public, who will get to see their chief executive in more canned appearances done for purposes of creating a “line of the day” rather than fulfilling the ultimate purpose of a republic, keeping in touch with the people on the matters of the nation.
Since its advent, the presidential press conference has gone from a high-profile forum to a begotten nuisance.
Whereas FDR gave 6.9 press conferences per month, Richard Nixon held just 0.5 per month, and when he did so, used them as opportunities to lie about the Watergate scandal.
Ronald Reagan, not the most mentally swift of men, held just 0.3 per month, and during the Iran-Contra scandal, he held none at all.
George H. W. Bush held his mini-conferences in the mornings, so attendance and viewership was lessened.
Bill Clinton held even fewer press conferences throughout his two terms, and during the Lewinsky scandal, answered to the press almost never.
Despite this downward trend, we still see a lot of our president in the newspaper and on the television screen, regardless of who he is or how popular he may be.
Shaking hands with a diplomat, waving to a camera, signing a document, getting into his helicopter, we are always being treated to knowledge of the president’s whereabouts and actions; he is still the center of the American political landscape, yet he answers directly into a camera very little.
This is exactly what the White House wants from this most recent announcement, that you see the president busy at work, in bits and pieces, giving off-the-cuff answers to reporters in more informal settings, as opposed to propped up behind a podium, where we all know this president does not do his best work.
You get to see his partial answers to questions done in the Briefing Room as opposed to long and drawn out answers in the lavish East Room.
Indeed, this is an administration that focuses hard on imagery and symbolism, planning out the president’s every handshake, spoken word, and small talk joke, and this announcement is a continuation of that unfortunate strategy.
This is not wholly, however, an indictment of the Bush administration, nor is it an indictment of the press, but perhaps it is a general comment on our civil society as a whole. With the press’s feeding frenzy for scandal and gossip, and the public consuming nothing but stories about affairs and kickbacks, public officials see little choice but to escape further into a cocoon of silence about both their private and public business.
They opt to put out, in assembly line-like fashion, 10-second sound bites, pre-packaged photo ops and positions taken in the name of “national security” and the public’s “general welfare” when one look deeper will show a society of backroom politics and money changing hands.
This cancer’s latest victim is the Office of the President, and in an era of quick fixes, no cure is in sight.
