Barack Obama: The inescapable president. From Good Morning America to televised town-hall meetings, ESPN to Men's Health, the leader of the free world misses few chances for free publicity. In his first nine months in office, Obama gave three times as many interviews as either of his two immediate predecessors, according to the White House Transition Project. He's already held more prime-time news conferences than George W. Bush did in eight years.
However Presidents weren't always so eager to meet the press. Thomas Jefferson had little use for the ink-stained wretches, believing newspapers offered "the caricatures of disaffected minds." During Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, reporters were forced to remain outside the White House gates, until Teddy took pity on them during a rainstorm (the voluble T.R. would later enjoy bantering with scribes while getting a shave). Many Presidents required the press to submit questions in writing and barred them from printing direct quotations; access was so limited the New York Times Arthur Krock won a Pulitzer for scoring a sit-down with FDR. Advances in technology have compelled recent leaders to engage with the media more often, albeit reluctantly. Dwight Eisenhower was the first to allow TV cameras into his press conferences; live telecasts, with all their pomp, began with JFK.
The press has only expanded since then, but savvy White House media teams now seize on tactics to reach voters directly. George W. Bush spoke before backdrops bearing the day's message (like STRENGTHENING OUR SCHOOLS or the notorious MISSION ACCOMPLISHED). And on Sept. 21, Obama became the first sitting President to grace David Letterman's couch--a day after he hit the Sunday-morning news shows on five networks. However it seems now that the once media darling, President Obama and his administration is turning on the media or at least calling them out. Yes the White House is planning to take the press on in certain regards.
There was never a single moment when White House staff decided the major media outlets were falling down on the job. There were instead several such moments. For press secretary Robert Gibbs, the realization came in early September, when the New York Times ran a front-page story about the bubbling parental outrage over President Obama's plan to address schoolchildren - even though the benign contents of the speech were not yet public. "You had to be like, 'Wait a minute,'" says Gibbs. "This thing has become a three-ring circus."
For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a "controversy," flipped an internal switch. "When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people's grandmother," he explains, "the normal rules of engagement don't apply." And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the "32" alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration. Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. "The idea - that the Washington Post didn't even question it," Dunn says, still marveling at the decision.
All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to "fact-check" Obama's many critics, the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new "sex clinics" in schools. Obama, was fresh from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, when he cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to "call 'em out."
The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President's vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration's critics, including a recent post that announced "Fox lies" and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama's 2016 Olympics effort.
White House officials offer no apologies. "The best analogy is probably baseball," says Gibbs. "The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move." The general in this war is Dunn, 51, a veteran campaign strategist who arrived at the White House in May. She has been a force in Democratic campaigns since the late 1980s and helmed Obama's rapid-response operation during his run. At the White House, she has become a devoted consumer of conservative-media reports and a fierce critic of Fox News, leading the Administration's effort to block officials, including Obama, from appearing on the network. "It's opinion journalism masquerading as news," Dunn says. "They are boosting their audience. But that doesn't mean we are going to sit back." Fox News's head of news, Michael Clemente, counters that the White House criticism unfairly conflates the network's reporters and its pundits, like Glenn Beck, whom he likens to "the op-ed page of a newspaper."
As a mother - who plans to transition to a new job later this year in order to spend more time with her 13-year-old son - Dunn is a rarity in the almost all-boys club that is Obama's inner circle. But her impact on the White House has been unmistakable. Since her arrival, the communications operation has been tightly refocused, with greater emphasis on planning ahead to shape the news cycle and controlling staff contacts with the press. In daily internal meetings, she points out where to strike back or admit error.
It is not hard to awaken her fiercer instincts. "Here in the White House, you are reluctant to feel like you have to go to that place," she says. "But we have to be more aggressive rather than just sit back and defend ourselves, because they will say anything. They will take any small thing and distort it." In other words, after almost nine months at the White House, the days of nonpartisan harmony are long gone - it's Us against Them. And the Obama Administration is playing to win. So let the game of “Call ‘Em Out” begin or should I say continue.
However Presidents weren't always so eager to meet the press. Thomas Jefferson had little use for the ink-stained wretches, believing newspapers offered "the caricatures of disaffected minds." During Theodore Roosevelt's presidency, reporters were forced to remain outside the White House gates, until Teddy took pity on them during a rainstorm (the voluble T.R. would later enjoy bantering with scribes while getting a shave). Many Presidents required the press to submit questions in writing and barred them from printing direct quotations; access was so limited the New York Times Arthur Krock won a Pulitzer for scoring a sit-down with FDR. Advances in technology have compelled recent leaders to engage with the media more often, albeit reluctantly. Dwight Eisenhower was the first to allow TV cameras into his press conferences; live telecasts, with all their pomp, began with JFK.
The press has only expanded since then, but savvy White House media teams now seize on tactics to reach voters directly. George W. Bush spoke before backdrops bearing the day's message (like STRENGTHENING OUR SCHOOLS or the notorious MISSION ACCOMPLISHED). And on Sept. 21, Obama became the first sitting President to grace David Letterman's couch--a day after he hit the Sunday-morning news shows on five networks. However it seems now that the once media darling, President Obama and his administration is turning on the media or at least calling them out. Yes the White House is planning to take the press on in certain regards.
There was never a single moment when White House staff decided the major media outlets were falling down on the job. There were instead several such moments. For press secretary Robert Gibbs, the realization came in early September, when the New York Times ran a front-page story about the bubbling parental outrage over President Obama's plan to address schoolchildren - even though the benign contents of the speech were not yet public. "You had to be like, 'Wait a minute,'" says Gibbs. "This thing has become a three-ring circus."
For deputy communications director Dan Pfeiffer, the more hyperbolic attacks on health-care reform this summer, which were often covered as a "controversy," flipped an internal switch. "When you are having a debate about whether or not you want to kill people's grandmother," he explains, "the normal rules of engagement don't apply." And for his boss, Anita Dunn, the aha moment came when the Washington Post ran a second op-ed from a Republican politician decrying the "32" alleged czars appointed by the Obama Administration. Nine of those so-called czars, it turned out, were subject to Senate confirmation, making them decidedly unlike the Russian monarchs. "The idea - that the Washington Post didn't even question it," Dunn says, still marveling at the decision.
All the criticism, both fair and misleading, took a toll, regularly knocking the White House off message. So a new White House strategy has emerged: rather than just giving reporters ammunition to "fact-check" Obama's many critics, the White House decided it would become a player, issuing biting attacks on those pundits, politicians and outlets that make what the White House believes to be misleading or simply false claims, like the assertion that health-care reform would establish new "sex clinics" in schools. Obama, was fresh from his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, when he cheered on the effort, telling his aides he wanted to "call 'em out."
The take-no-prisoners turn has come as a surprise to some in the press, considering the largely favorable coverage that candidate Obama received last fall and given the President's vows to lower the rhetorical temperature in Washington and not pay attention to cable hyperbole. Instead, the White House blog now issues regular denunciations of the Administration's critics, including a recent post that announced "Fox lies" and suggested that the cable network was unpatriotic for criticizing Obama's 2016 Olympics effort.
White House officials offer no apologies. "The best analogy is probably baseball," says Gibbs. "The only way to get somebody to stop crowding the plate is to throw a fastball at them. They move." The general in this war is Dunn, 51, a veteran campaign strategist who arrived at the White House in May. She has been a force in Democratic campaigns since the late 1980s and helmed Obama's rapid-response operation during his run. At the White House, she has become a devoted consumer of conservative-media reports and a fierce critic of Fox News, leading the Administration's effort to block officials, including Obama, from appearing on the network. "It's opinion journalism masquerading as news," Dunn says. "They are boosting their audience. But that doesn't mean we are going to sit back." Fox News's head of news, Michael Clemente, counters that the White House criticism unfairly conflates the network's reporters and its pundits, like Glenn Beck, whom he likens to "the op-ed page of a newspaper."
As a mother - who plans to transition to a new job later this year in order to spend more time with her 13-year-old son - Dunn is a rarity in the almost all-boys club that is Obama's inner circle. But her impact on the White House has been unmistakable. Since her arrival, the communications operation has been tightly refocused, with greater emphasis on planning ahead to shape the news cycle and controlling staff contacts with the press. In daily internal meetings, she points out where to strike back or admit error.
It is not hard to awaken her fiercer instincts. "Here in the White House, you are reluctant to feel like you have to go to that place," she says. "But we have to be more aggressive rather than just sit back and defend ourselves, because they will say anything. They will take any small thing and distort it." In other words, after almost nine months at the White House, the days of nonpartisan harmony are long gone - it's Us against Them. And the Obama Administration is playing to win. So let the game of “Call ‘Em Out” begin or should I say continue.
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