Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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During the first Trump presidency, the briefing room was a contentious place. The White House took away credentials from reporters, seemingly on a whim. CNN, you might remember, went to court for an injunction to get their correspondent Jim Acosta back in the room after his pass was revoked. This time around, there are hints from the Trump team of a reshuffle in the room.
Traditionally, the front row is occupied by the four major networks, along with CNN, the AP and Reuters. The big newspapers have assigned seats in the row behind them. But last November, Don Jr. on a Daily Wire podcast said this. We had the conversation about opening up.
the press room to a lot of these independent journalists. Like, you know, why should if The New York Times has lied, they've been adverse to everything. They're functioning as the marketing arm of the Democrat Party. Like, why not open it up to people who have larger viewerships, stronger followings? That may be in the works. Let's see. That's going to blow up some heads. So, you know, we'll see.
There's been no official confirmation of a shakeup, but with or without it, we know from past experience that the Trump White House is likely to be combative with the outlets that cover it.
Not that Donald Trump is like the only president in history to have a contentious relationship with the press. Back in January of 2017, just before Trump's first inauguration, Brooks spoke to Time magazine's Olivia Waxman, who, with the help of the Time archive, had traced the path of the White House press corps and found that it never did run smooth.
Brooke began the interview by asking her to take us back to the very beginning, to the birth of the relationship between the press and the government at the founding of the country. Journalists were not allowed to attend the Constitutional Convention, nor were they allowed in early state legislatures or the Continental Congress.
Actually, a gossip columnist named Anne Royale literally had to steal John Quincy Adams' clothes to get him to grant her an interview. She sat on his clothes on the bank of the Potomac until the bathing president granted her an interview. Wow.
Was there anything that really jumped out at you as surprising when you went through the archive of Time magazine? Well, I was surprised that women had been the first to argue that everything in the White House should be public knowledge because taxpayers paid for its upkeep. Emily Briggs of Philadelphia. She said, when we go to the executive mansion, we go to our own house.
We recline on our own satin and ebony. And then we get to President Grover Cleveland. And you say that's when we begin to see the emergence of the White House reporter that we'd recognize today. Right. So there's a historian named Martha Kumar who pinpoints it to Fatty Price of the Washington Evening Star. He was one of the first reporters to work the White House beat in
He sat at a table in a hallway and would pepper people with questions who were walking by. Martha Kumar found a letter that Thaddeus Price had written a White House staff member saying, thank you for the tablecloth. So that seems to be the first sign we have that reporters were camped out, so to speak. We're talking there of the 1880s, 1890s. You get to the 1900s.
to Teddy Roosevelt, who really loved reporters. Yes, he had a sort of newspaper cabinet that typically would meet with him during Roosevelt's early afternoon shave. And if you can imagine, reporters got that kind of access in the early 20th century. Enviable now. But Teddy Roosevelt did banish reporters to what he called the Aeneas Club,
if the stories proved to be embarrassing for the president. And Fortune magazine reported that the journalist would readily forgive him because he made, quote, such astounding copy. Roosevelt had his favorites, whereas President Wilson seemed to open up his doors to a wide range of reporters. A lot of people, less intimacy. Yes. Yes.
Yes. Wilson's private secretary, Joseph Tumulty, told reporters that the president would, quote, look them in the face and chat with them for a few minutes. So on March 15th, 1913, 125 newspaper staffers showed up and Wilson said, your numbers forced me to make a speech to you en masse instead of chatting with each of you as I had hoped to do and thus getting greater pleasure and personal acquaintance out of this meeting. Now, FDR...
Like his relative, Teddy Roosevelt, was catnip for the press. He gave, you write, nearly a thousand press conferences almost twice a week.
Time reported that he kept most White House news hawks fluttering happily. Those press conferences were ones where they had a real exchange of information. It was being compared to prime minister's question time in the UK. But he also locked the doors so no reporters could walk out. Of the press room? Yes. Right.
On occasion, he would call correspondents liars or tell them to put on dunce caps. Really? I guess it's okay to call a particular correspondent a liar if it's not being televised. But that's when the next big change happened under Eisenhower. That's a watershed moment. James Haggerty, Eisenhower's press secretary, had been on the campaign trail. He had worked with the press corps before. He knew what a difference the press made.
So January 1955 was the first televised news conference. With the president. Yes. Well, I see we're trying a new experiment this morning. I hope it doesn't prove to be a disturbing info. Well, tomorrow, the second anniversary of your inauguration, I wonder if you'd care to give us an appraisal of your first two years and tell us something of your hopes for the next two or maybe even the next six?
Looks like a loaded question. They were thinking about it in the same way that Trump thinks about Twitter. This is our chance to get to the public directly, to be seen by the public directly. But...
Hagerty edited the thing. It wasn't in the control of any TV network. Right. And the New York Post was surprised at how scripted this was. I'll quote from that article. Right.
Thus, after Wednesday's conference, Hagerty deleted 11 of the 27 questions and answers before letting the show go on the road. For example, when asked about his delay in the reappointment of Ewan Clegg as commissioner of labor statistics, the president confessed he had never heard of the fella. Now, when you described LBJ's relationship to the press, it's...
In a way, it kind of reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt's shaving. And you note that Johnson was pretty unceremonious as well. Oh, yes. A White House reporter said that he once answered reporters' questions about the economy aboard Air Force One while stripping down until he was standing buck naked and waving his towel for emphasis. Johnson just didn't have any boundaries, apparently. Yeah.
It was President Nixon who gave the press corps their current home. But he wasn't there by doing the press any big favor, right? Right. He wanted to keep presidential visitors and White House staff away from reporters. To designate a briefing room by putting a floor over the White House swimming pool.
And when it opened in 1970, the Washington Post said it looked like the lobby of a fake Elizabethan steakhouse when the stage is hidden behind the curtains. And Ronald Reagan's press secretary, James S. Brady, for whom the briefing room is named, used to joke that he and Reagan always planned on installing a trap door so reporters who got out of line would fall into the swimming pool if he pushed a button on his podium.
In tracking the changes over centuries, do you notice a general trend? Presidents may tweak the format of things as they come into office, but there were questions when Eisenhower came in whether to keep reporters in the White House. And Nixon thought about not having a press secretary at one point, but—
Ultimately, what happens is that presidents and their staff recognize that having 100 reporters and TV cameras and photographers in one place, this is a great resource. My favorite quote about precedents these days is from a special assistant to Calvin Coolidge, who said that if you can get the president to do a thing...
twice in a row, then every other president will do it. I think the same could probably be said of the White House press corps. Olivia, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. Olivia Waxman is a staff reporter for Time magazine. Brooke spoke to her in 2017.
Thanks for checking out this week's Midweek Podcast. On the big show this weekend, Brooke speaks to Rebecca Solnit about the role of memory and forgetting in light of the California wildfires. See you Friday. But in the meantime, go follow us on Blue Sky and Instagram and check out the On The Media subreddit. I'm Michael Loewinger.
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