A New White House Press Room
Despite its spruced-up look and high-tech improvements, the White House briefing room, which reopens Wednesday morning, isn't returning to its glory days anytime soon.
President Bush and his wife, Laura, are scheduled to cut a ribbon and welcome the press corps back from their temporary quarters across the street at a government conference center. And the new facility, originally built in 1970 by Richard Nixon over a swimming pool in the West Wing, will be a big improvement over its predecessor in many ways. It will be more appealing in appearance and stocked with newfangled gizmos including hundreds of miles of fiber-optic cable and big TV screens allowing the use of modernistic charts and graphs to illustrate the official White House line.
But in the end, the most important aspect of the briefing room is what the White House does with it. And right now, it's more a theater for public-relations gambits and sharp-tongued sparring between press officers and reporters than a venue for substantive discussions of the president's thinking, or policy ruminations, or even breaking news.
It wasn't always this way.
In years past, new policies were frequently announced and explained there. Senior officials would troop through to offer their thoughts, and even presidents would appear with regularity. That was especially true during the term of George Herbert Walker Bush, the current president's father, and during Bill Clinton's eight years in office. Bush the father, for example, would work his way through questions from each reporter, until every journalist had his or her chance to quiz him. Bill Clinton often did the same, and the country got a good sense of their thought processes.
Under George W. Bush, presidential press conferences are much less frequent. And fewer reporters say they get much out of the q&a sessions that do occur in the briefing room, including the ones held by the press staff. They have become too scripted and familiar. So the most important reporting goes on elsewhere, in private interviews or phone calls. I would suggest that this void of information about Dubya's deliberations has damaged not only his reputation as a thinker but has also deprived the country of important information about the rationale for his actions.
On one level, the new facilities are a huge leap forward for the press corps. For many years, the room was a dilapidated mess. Before the 11-month, $8 million in renovations (for which news organizations paid about $2 million), the area featured blue-cushioned chairs stained with coffee and the remnants of half-eaten lunches, with many broken seats, and the walls lined with ladders, camera equipment and other photographers' paraphernalia.
I remember the first time I stepped into the briefing room in the spring of 1986, as a new White House correspondent. It was much smaller than it appeared on TV, and for most of every day, members of the press corps would lounge, read, or snooze in the seats or in their work spaces, waiting for something to happen. For what is supposed to be the most glamorous of journalistic beats, that took me a bit by surprise. The best reporters, I quickly learned, find a way to get as much information as they can through enterprise, energy, and perseverance, not from official "news" events.
The nature of White House reporting remains what it has always been. It involves long periods of tedium, punctuated by moments of high drama and occasions when personal initiative finally pays off. That dynamic won't change, no matter what happens to the briefing room.