Press and Presidents: Sometimes a Stormy Mix, Panelists Say

Did any president really like the news media?

That was the question host Marvin Kalb put to his panel at the Nov. 16 “The Kalb Report” as they considered the often stormy relationship between the press and the president during more than 200 years of American history.

President Gerald Ford seemed to like reporters, all of the panelists – ABC’s Sam Donaldson and historians Douglas Brinkley and Martha Joynt Kumar -- agreed.

“Ronald Reagan sort of liked us,” said Donaldson, who gained a reputation for bellowing questions at Reagan as he boarded the Marine One helicopter on the South Lawn. “He thought he could use us.”

Reporters could not get Reagan to answer a straight question on policy, Donaldson said, but television reporters could not resist the great pictures that Reagan press operatives created as backdrops for press events.

Once he became a straight man for one of Reagan’s lines, Donaldson said. He said he asked the president whether he could think of any mistakes he had made. “Yes,” Reagan said. “For many years I was a Democrat.”

President Theodore Roosevelt liked reporters, Brinkley said, “although he did create the term ‘muckraking.’ ” Roosevelt was among the first presidents to stage events for the press, and reporters always found him great copy, he said.

President George Washington – who was the first in many things – canceled all of his newspaper subscriptions when he became president, Kalb said. But Kumar noted that the first president also encouraged a partisan press – when it supported him.

“When he left office, he recognized the power of the press,” Kumar said of Washington. “He never delivered his farewell address. He simply gave it to a newspaper that supported him.”

President Grover Cleveland, who was president in the late 19th century, was the first president to have an aide who regularly briefed the press, Kumar said, and President Benjamin Harrison took a couple of reporters when he traveled by train.

Both Roosevelts and Reagan were masters of using the press, the panelists said. President Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to see the advantage of going over the heads of the White House press by holding the first televised press conference.

Kumar said Eisenhower’s press secretary, James Hagarty, wrote in his diary, “To hell with slanted reporters, we’ll go directly to the people.”

But the relationship between the president and the news media fundamentally changed with the presidential lies surrounding the Vietnam War and Watergate, Donaldson said.

“When I came here (in the early 1960s,) journalists vied to be friends with the president,” he said. “After those lies, it changed to holding the president’s feet to the fire.”

Of recent presidents, President Jimmy Carter was the least effective in using the press, Brinkley said.

Today, Brinkley said, both the White House and reporters are caught up in the “snap finger pace” of online reporting. “All presidents have to master the media of the moment,” he said. “That hasn’t stopped since the beginning of the republic. But it’s so much faster today.”

And what was the most embarrassing moment for any president?

Monica Lewinsky, the panelists agreed. But Donaldson added, “although President George H.W. Bush throwing up on the lap of the Japanese prime minister is an honorable second.”

-- Gil Klein, [email protected]