The Problem With the Press...Is the Press

So says a number of veteran White House correspondents:

Several veteran and prize-winning journalists who covered presidents from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush say that the current crop of White House correspondents are too timid and deferential and have played a role in killing the impact of presidential news conferences.

"If you watch an Obama news conference, and watched a Bush news conference previous to that, where correspondents sit in their seats with their hands folded on their laps, [it's] as if they are in the room with a monarch and they have to wait to be recognized by the president," says Sid Davis, the former NBC Washington bureau chief who covered nine presidents. "It looks like they are watching a funeral service at [Washington funeral firm] Joseph Gawler's and it shouldn't be that way."

Adds Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporter Haynes Johnson, "It's all very stale, very structured, very pale."

And longtime NBC and ABC reporter Sander Vanocur: "You want to know what's wrong with the press? The press is what's wrong with the press." ...

When the topic turn to today's White House press corps, the grizzled veterans were dismissive, calling them weak imitations of their Cold War predecessors.

Davis says "I don't like today's news conferences" with the president. Kennedy's, he says, were "thoroughly unrehearsed, natural and they worked to a large extent." Today's versions, he adds, "look like they are rehearsed." [See editorial cartoons about Obama.]

Worse, he says, reporters look like stenographers. "I think democracy is noisy. The news conferences should get to back to what they were even if people are going to raise their voices."

"Stenographers" is a great and very accurate description of the current White House press corps. Obama tells then what to write and they write and report it.

Remember when Sam Donaldson used to shout out his questions and aggressively question Reagan and other presidents? None of the current crop of wimps will dare try that with Obama, and when somebody does get on his bad side, he bans them.