Covering The Bush White House

By Laurence Zuckerman

As George Bush took the oath of office last week, another, less heralded transition was quietly taking place in news bureaus throughout the capital. ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson, who became the embodiment of the White House press corps during the Reagan era, stepped aside after twelve years on the beat to co-anchor a new ABC prime-time news hour due later this year. The Washington Post's Lou Cannon, who started covering Reagan in his early days in California, began a leave of absence to write a book about the Reagan presidency.

Like the incoming Bush Cabinet, the new White House press corps has many familiar faces. Lesley Stahl, who covered Reagan's first term for CBS News, is returning. So are veteran Reagan watchers for ABC, NBC, CNN, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Boston Globe. Yet White House reporters old and new take up their posts at a time when the beat, though still one of journalism's most prestigious, has lost some of its luster after eight years of obsessive news management by the Reagan Administration. "Like the peso, it's been devalued," admits Boston Globe reporter Walter Robinson, who saw two colleagues pass up offers to move to Washington to cover Bush. Adds Wall Street Journal correspondent Michel McQueen, 29, one of the few reporters new to the White House assignment: "People have said, 'Congratulations -- and condolences.' "

Covering the White House has always been a difficult job. The competition is keen, and the sources are limited. Unlike Congressmen or even big-city mayors, who can be staked out and buttonholed by reporters, the President and his top aides are carefully protected by elaborate security measures and protocol. Journalists who push too hard risk getting frozen out. "Generally the best, most aggressive reporting does not come from White House reporters, because they have to maintain their good relations," says Knight-Ridder correspondent Owen Ullmann.

Still, the White House is considered a plum assignment, especially in television, because almost anything the President does or says makes the front page and tops the evening news. Exploiting this seemingly insatiable appetite for presidential news was one of the Reagan Administration's key contributions to the long history of White House press manipulation. By placing the President in attractive settings -- meeting foreign heads of state or splitting wood at his California ranch -- the White House p.r. apparatchiks provided the networks with the daily supply of visuals they desired, while cultivating the image of an active and accessible leader. In reality, Reagan was carefully cloistered from reporters, who could rarely do more than shout questions at him over the din of helicopter rotors.

Bush promises to be different. Although he adopted the Reagan method during the campaign, stage-managing his every appearance and sequestering himself from the press, he held more news conferences in the ten weeks following the election than Reagan did in his last two years in office. "I think you will see him act as President very much as he has been in the last few weeks," says White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater.

After the frustrations of the Reagan years, the new White House reporters seem enraptured by Bush, at least for now. "If you ask him a question, he'll stop and answer it," gushes Janet Cawley of the Chicago Tribune. While Reagan rarely broke from his precise daily schedule, Bush seems to be cultivating the image of a "spontaneous" citizen-President, impulsively heading out on the town for a Chinese dinner or a movie.

Even during the transition period, however, there were signs that Bush might not be so open when it counts. On Jan. 5, the day after U.S. F-14s shot down two Libyan jets, a Bush speech to a veterans' group that was supposed to be covered by a pool of reporters was closed to the press, apparently to shield Bush from questions about the dogfight. (The Vice President's office claims that the event was never officially designated for press coverage.) The incident recalls the protective instincts of the Bush campaign's image handlers, many of whom will have the same roles in the White House.

Surprisingly, few in the new White House press corps seem to have considered how they may combat Reagan-style manipulation in the future. "There is nothing the press can do if Bush is as popular as Reagan was," says Lesley Stahl. Not true. For one thing, editors and producers can fight the compulsion to define everything the President does as news.

They can also act on a principle that is agreed upon by news executives at every symposium about the press and the presidency: that the White House is in many ways the worst place to cover the Executive Branch. By redeploying some of the vast resources spent on the "body watch," news organizations could more actively probe the dozens of federal agencies that actually make up the Administration and carry out most of its work. That would help free reporters from their dependence on handouts from the White House. For as United Press International correspondent Helen Thomas, a 28-year White House veteran, rightly points out, "All new Presidents promise to be more open, but eventually the door closes, and the penchant for secrecy grows."