Covering the President: News or Public Relations?

'Staying the course' has become the broken record of the Bush Administration. When Bush's numbers fall, Bush and his advisers try to find a new way of saying the same thing. They call it leadership and many of us call it public relations since nothing is changing except an effort to prop up Bush's image. Walter Pincus of The Washinton Post is one of the more prominent journalists of the day. He has a post in Nieman Watchdog where he talks about how the presidency has become focused on public relations in the last twenty-five years and of course he discusses the present; here's an excerpt (hat tip to Josh Marshall of TPM):

At the end of Reagan's first year, David Broder, the Post's distinguished political reporter, wrote a column about Reagan being among the least involved Presidents he had covered. The result was he received an onslaught of mail from people who repeatedly said they had seen him every night on TV working different issues. The often told Deaver story is that one night CBS News correspondent Leslie Stahl met him after narrating a particularly critical piece on Reagan, and Deaver told her as long as the President was on camera smiling it didn't matter what she had said about him. When President George H.W. Bush succeeded Reagan and occasionally drifted off the appointed subject, criticism began to appear that he "couldn't stay on message." When Bill Clinton arrived and as President did two, three or four things in a day, some critics went after him for "mixing up the daily message."

The truth of the matter is that with help from the news media, being able to "stay on message" is now considered a presidential asset, perhaps even a requirement. Of course, the "message" is the public relations spin that the White House wants to present and not what the President actually did that day or what was really going on inside the White House. This system reached its apex this year when the White House started to give "exclusives" -- stories that found their way to Page One, in which readers learn that during the next week President Bush will do a series of four speeches supporting his Iraq policy because his polls are down. Such stories are often attributed to unnamed "senior administration officials." Lo and behold, the next week those same news outlets, and almost everyone else, carries each of the four speeches in which Bush essentially repeats what he's been saying for two years.

The other issue that's tied to public relations is the disconnect between what a president or his advisers say and what the facts appear to be. The media in the last five years has not done nearly enough in that area and has often failed to point out the inconsistencies in the Bush Administration's stories. I'm glad to see a major journalist talking about these issues.

And maybe millions of Americans need to ask themselves why they are so susceptible to the public relations format when it's often the execution or even substance of a politician's policy that is the problem and not the politician's image.