Hastening The Demise

by digby

Michael Wolff has written an interesting analysis of the press corps’ relationship to the Obama White House. His first observation is that they have learned to manipulate the press without talking about it, which is a much more effective and sophisticated approach to governance than the constant process talk that characterized the Clinton years and much of the Bush administration as well. There is no need to tell the press how clever you are all the time. It really tends to hurt the cause. (This article comes on a day when somebody is gossiping in the NY Times about Larry Summers, so the idea that they have tamed the preening and the leaks may have been a simple facet of the honeymoon stage that’s now wearing off.)

Wolff then talks about Robert Gibbs’ almost dismissive attitude toward White House reporters, but reveals that he spends a lot of time fluffing the “dinosaurs” (aka the MSM.) He writes:

… they’re wooing The New York Times as assiduously as Pierre Salinger did on behalf of John Kennedy in 1962. And, perhaps not surprisingly, The New York Times woos back—rewarding the president with a lavishness of coverage not seen since, well, J.F.K. in 1962. It’s an establishment lovefest.

It’s some perfect re-creation of a relationship between president and news media that has not been seen since the White House pressroom was a clubby place with reporters invited into the press secretary’s office for whiskey and cigars. It’s cozy. Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, who would have been, in previous administrations, the highest and most exclusive White House sources, have become almost casual quotes for the Times.

It is, curiously, a return to a time when the press was so much more dependent on the goodwill, and susceptible to the care and feeding, of the president. Indeed, The New York Times, and the rest of the established press, needs Barack Obama a lot more than he needs them.

Interesting, no?

This is good for the president, no doubt about it, but I’m not so sure it’s good for progressive politics. It’s certainly not good for journalism. Indeed, it’s just an escalation of the practices the Bush administration put in place and we all know where that led.

But Wolff’s most interesting observations are about the White House’s relationship with the new media:

Courting the dinosaurs, the Obama people feed the increasingly hungry new media the scraps—and manage, mostly, to have them thankful for them.

The Huffington Post has become an ideal back door for the most partisan stuff. It’s being used in a way that suddenly seems not all that dissimilar to how the Bush White House used Fox News. It’s as obvious and as unfiltered.

“The Times, it appears, gets soft, thoughtful, and complicated stuff. HuffPo gets the mean and simplistic,” says Michael Tomasky, The Guardian’s Washington-based American editor-at-large.

In other words, the Obama people have purchase on both established media and partisan media. If the Bush people ran a singular, blaring, drumbeating message, the Obama people are running a message across numerous spectra of purpose and subtlety and payoff. Indeed, while the Times seems reserved for the more weighty exegesis, and the HuffPo for its attacks, Politico, the politics-focused site that began during the last political campaign and is now trying to build an off-election-cycle business, has become the prime outlet for Obama White House gossip—the fuel of the day’s political kibitzing, the candy by which an odd intimacy is created with both the media and the political hard core. It’s politics as a short take—politics as an item. “They use it for the quick pops. They get the headline out there. They short-circuit analysis. They keep momentum going. All day, rat-a-tat-tat,” says one pressroom-watcher. “They essentially write it themselves.”

“That Whiteboard ain’t going to write itself,” Bill Burton reportedly observed about Politico’s Whiteboard, a moment-by-moment chronicle of White House activity.
[…]

Arguably, the celebrity press came into existence and has grown with such force as a reflection of America’s disenchantment with and lack of interest in politics and politicians. Civic life lost its connection to popular culture.

Until Obama. Now, in the hierarchy of celebrities, nobody ranks as high, or is as cover-worthy, as the president and his family.

[…]

Indeed, the efforts at control—negotiating all the nuances of celebrity coverage—by the White House press team are pretty much at the levels of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

‘Of course there are changes going on, but we’re message focused—we believe our message will find its audience,” says young Burton as the press clamors outside his small office.

It’s a cat-that’s-eaten-the-canary kind of thing.

They have been handed a most remarkable historical moment—in which they get to remake the media in their own image. They have the power and they are the subject. These people in this White House are in greater control of the media than any administration before them.

Oh joy.

I’m as happy as anyone that our “team” is in power, but it is not good for democracy to have a shallow, tabloid, easily manipulated, corporate press no matter who is the subject. The country needs responsible, independent media that is dedicated to giving the people the information they need to participate in their civic life. I don’t find this reassuring at all.

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