Have Press Briefings Changed in 50 Years?
Brent E. Zepke, Esq.
(Two trivia questions with a bit of humor inspired this article.)
Who has attended more White House press briefings: President Joe Biden or Brent Zepke (that’s me)?
2) Have White House press briefings changed in the last 50 years?
Imagine the customary music playing while reading some information that may be helpful to consider.
Press Conference in 1976
On October 21, 1976, the Press Secretary was Ron Nessen, a veteran who had been seriously wounded by grenade fragments while on patrol outside Pleiku in Vietnam in 1966.
Nessen was appointed by President Gerald Ford, a Republican.
When in D.C. on business, I was invited into Nessen’s office in the White House where, to my surprise, there was framed Doonesbury cartoon. It was not a surprise that it made fun of Nessen, since the creator, Gary Trudeau’s cartoons frequently expressed his liberal viewpoint, that today is expressed by his wife, Jane Pauley, as the anchor of CBS News Sunday Morning.
The surprise was Nessen’s sense of humor in framing and hanging it.
I entered the White House Press Briefing Room, which looked as I anticipated it would and is still the same today.
What was unanticipated however, the way reporters filled the room.
The first reporters – dressed like the “before” photos in John Malloy’s excellent book “Dress for Success” – left the first couple of rows empty. Subsequently, the reporters who strolled in – dressed like the “after” photos – filled in the first couple of front rows where they could ask questions.
It seems the major news sources have certain privileges.
The reporters listened to a report on the success of President Ford’s trip, before – in a shift that Don Quixote would have been proud of – ignored the report and focused their questions on the president’s golf shot hitting a spectator. No one asked how the spectator was, which was fine, but the questions revolved upon on trying to illustrate that hitting the spectator supported their theme that President Ford was clumsy. If this was not so insulting, it would be funny, as President Ford had been an All-American center on the University of Michigan football team.
The mainstream media seemed no more interested in that fact than did Madam Defarge in Charles Dicken’s novel “The Tale of Two Cities.”
But then President Ford was a Republican.
In my walk through the room where the press would write their stories, their cubicles being so close together helped explain why so many of their pieces were so similar.
My next stop was the Rose Garden, created in 1903 by First Lady Edith Roosevelt, to watch President Ford sign the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA). The RCRA was to protect the environment and people’s health from hazardous waste, conserve resources, and encourage recycling.
Subsequently, President Ford walking up to me and saying, “I like your tie bar, but my daughter won’t let me wear one,” was an indication of what a soft-spoken warm man Gerald Ford was; he physically looked like he was ready to go back in a game for Michigan.
Press Conference in 2024
On October 4, 2024, the Press Secretary is Karine Jean-Pierre, who previously worked with the progressive group MOVEOn.org and as a contributor to NBC News and MSNBC.
President Biden entered the Press Briefing Room – renamed the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room after Brady who was shot during the assignation attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
The president briefly mentioned the suspension of the port strike, the jobs report, the economy, and that there was a hurricane while, of course, working in his customary shot at MAGA Republicans.
His interjecting that he and V.P Kamala Harris had been “singing from the same song sheet” and “We… she… helped pass all the laws that are being employed,” led to the question: Why did he say that, and why now?
Pundits are wondering if the “why” was because President Biden was responding to Vice President Harris’s campaign slogan of “It’s time to move on,” implying that she was not part of the decision making during the Biden-Harris administration.
The same pundits are wondering if President Biden’s unprecedented, unscheduled, very first ever press briefing – causing television coverage to shift away from Harris reading a speech about her economic plan to the United Auto Workers – was planned or was a coincidence.
Perhaps the words of the inimitable Yogi Berra, “That was too coincidental to be a coincidence,” answer that question.
The mainstream press did not ask any questions about the president, about the reason for mentioning Harris, nor about the impact on inflation of the 62% wage increases the port workers will receive, why Israel was not communicating with him, or what he was doing to help the victims of Hurricane Helene.
Unlike the coverage of President Ford, neither President Biden’s stiff-legged walk into the room nor his repeated falling on the stairs to Air Force One and elsewhere, caused them to speculate that these were due to his clumsiness.
But then President Biden is a Democrat.
Conclusion
The answers to the trivia questions are:
1) It is a tie as both of us attended just one press briefing.
2) The French writer Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Kerr, writing, in 1849, that “The more things change, the more they stay the same” (Plus ca change, plus ca reste la) is applicable to White House press briefings. Comparing 2024 to 1976, the political party of the president changed, as did the press’s shifting to a friendly approach from an adversarial one, which may simply reflect the changes of the political party of the president. What has remained the same is the focus on reporters’ preconceived ideas rather than the material presented to them.
While we cannot change the press, we can change from blindly accepting the preconceived ideas of the mainstream media.
Santa Barbara Current’s Endorsement List (Nov 5, 2024 Election)
Excellent, Brent. One of the things that has shocked and dismayed me since moving back to Santa Barbara in 2016 after three decades in NYC is how many people here trust the mainstream media.
Invariably, when people discuss current events - among a crowd at a party or just to me over lunch - I recognize their opinions as exactly what has recently been printed in NYT. They never attribute any of their words to a writer, they simply regurgitate it as if it was coming directly from their own brain.
These people are also, invariably, Trump haters.
At a party my husband and I gave in 2018, I was passing around some crostini to six people excitedly discussing Trump's Russian collusion. I knew I should be a good hostess and not talk politics but I was too disturbed by the lies they were repeating. So I said, “Okay, you've all been reading the New York Times on this, right?” They vigorously nodded. I added “Why on earth do you trust the New York Times?” They all stopped and stared at me. “What kind of idiot wouldn't trust the New York Times?” one sputtered.
I explained that I don't trust the New York Times, that they have lied to their readers repeatedly over the years. For example, during our involvement in Central America, they deliberately buried the money Bush made from drug trafficking. And how about the Weapons of Mass Destruction?
They asked who I trust. “I trust myself,” I said, “to check out anything I read in a news source to the best I can before I accept it as fact. And I can find nothing to support their claims about Trump being a Russian collaborator.”
I explained that I lived among the media when I was in NYC. And that what I learned was there are very few truly independent journalists. Mostly, they are people with high mortgages on their houses in Pelham Manor and children in expensive schools, and mostly their journalistic honesty was compromised long ago at Harvard or Yale or Columbia Journalism School by how much they cared about being seated at the right table.
Stunned silence. Shortly after the party, a longtime friend wrote me “I am extremely fond of you, Polly, but you have become deranged, delusional and dangerous in your support of Trump and we can no longer be friends.” I wrote him back that my support was not for Trump but for the truth. I never heard from him again, and sadly, he passed away in 2020.
So here's how the mainstream media has changed. It was always corrupt. But it allowed for some honest journalists and reporters to publish. Now it is completely corrupt and the honest journalists - like Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald and Miranda Devine - get ridiculed for doing a good job and with the except of Miranda, have to get independently published.
But the real problem is the readers who support the mainstream media propaganda machine. Media wants to make money. We'll never have a completely honest media, but we could have a better one if people clicked on news sites for honesty, not just on what makes them feel self righteous, safe in their stupidity and feeds their worst tendency, which is to find a scapegoat to blame for their unhappiness and failures.
Congratulations goes to Kamala Harris in last night’s interview for coming off as; angry, unhinged and foaming at the mouth!