New York Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller calls the Bush White House the most secretive in modern times.

Bumiller describes media's battle
to cover a secretive White House

Working as a White House reporter during the War on Terrorism has been a bit like actually being at war, journalistically speaking, according to Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times, who lectured on Dec. 3 as a guest of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism at Yale.

In her talk, "Shock, Awe and Battle Fatigue: Covering the Bush White House," Bumiller said that reporting on the 43rd presidency "often feels like being on one side of a war against a disciplined, clever enemy that fervently believes in the righteousness of its cause.

"The relationships between the press and all modern White Houses have been like that, of course," she told the audience in Rosenfeld Hall. "The difference is that this administration has turned that tension into a fine art -- and fundamentally altered the relationship between the White House and the press."

Bumiller's first day on The New York Times' White House beat was Sept. 10, 2001. The events of the following day, she said, made it clear that the job she had "signed up for" was "very different from the job I had." While covering the president at such an historic time was "a better story," she asserted, the launch of the War on Terrorism "also opened up the first real front between the White House and the press."

After the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House "basically shut down," she recalled -- public tours were cancelled, sharp-shooters were stationed on the roof and the press was cut off from all but official pronouncements. "The White House made no secret that it was clamping down on the information flow," Bumiller said.

President George W. Bush was "already no fan of free information flow," said the journalist. "After 9/11, when a lot of government secrecy was justified in the name of national security that became easier."

Bush is a man of "enormous charm and focus" with "a quick fuse" who is "very much in charge," said Bumiller. He commands "enormous loyalty from a staff that genuinely likes him and also fears him," she added. "They do what he says. And if that means not talking to the press, they don't talk to the press."

Bumiller said she adopted what she calls an "outside-in strategy" after one of the war plans for Iraq. "I had to circle the White House and get information by calling people that the people in the White House talked to," she explains.

"That's always how a good reporter covers the White House, of course, but that approach became essential to covering this White House," she noted. In fact, it is easier to get information from "the most secret agencies of the government" than from the President's staff, she told the audience. "I've found the CIA to be surprisingly cooperative on some subjects that the White House won't touch."

Nevertheless, the current occupants of the White House have revealed "unparalleled" political skills, contended Bumiller, and "it was these skills that helped them sell the American public on the war in Iraq ... a spectacular selling job, of which I'm sorry to say the press played a part."

When rumblings about a possible war in Iraq first began in "the news vacuum of August" last year, said Bumiller, the President remained silent. As soon as legislators returned to Washington, D.C., in September, however, Bush "suddenly began talking more urgently than he ever had about the dangers of Saddam Hussein," she noted.

Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, later admitted to Bumiller that this was a deliberate strategy, saying: "Well, even from a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August." That statement, said the journalist, was "one of the single-best quotes I ever got out of this White House."

Bush's covert Thanksgiving Day visit to the troops in Baghdad was another example of "brilliant politics," she said, and "sealed the reputation of this White House as one of the most secretive in history." It also sparked debate among journalists about the "extraordinary demands" the White House made on members of the media who accompanied the president -- not only by making it "complicit" in that secrecy but by exposing them to serious risk, she noted.

Bumiller told the audience that, while she did not go to Baghdad, she did write about the event for The New York Times "vividly, as if I had been [there]." She was able to do this, she explained, because of the longstanding practice of having the one newspaper correspondent whose turn it is to fly with the president on Air Force One provide a report of his or her up-close observations to other members of the press pool. For the Baghdad trip, that reporter was Mike Allen of The Washington Post, and Bumiller based her story on his report. Her editors, she noted, added a sentence to make it clear to readers that Bumiller's article was based on another reporter's account.

"That was a good addition, and it is in essence truth in packaging," said the reporter -- noting that it was, however, "inserted largely because of the changes at the paper since the catastrophe of Jayson Blair," the New York Times reporter who was fired for falsifying stories.

While the White House beat is "one of the hardest jobs at the paper," Bumiller said she enjoys it. "What I write about is really important. Ninety-five percent of it is interesting, and 30% of it is absolutely riveting."

However, she commented, "I do think that this White House has been alarmingly successful at keeping the press at arm's length, and has set a troubling new standard for secrecy. I worry that there will be no going back, and that future White Houses, both Democratic and Republican, will look to this White House as a model for how to control the press."

-- By LuAnn Bishop

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