Kalb Report: Obama White House hostile to news media -– but Lincoln was worse

The Obama administration has had a “chilling effect” on a free press and on the work of White House reporters, three senior White House correspondents told host Marvin Kalb on the latest edition of “The Kalb Report” June 1.

“This administration has undertaken more criminal prosecutions because of press leaks than every other administration in the history of the country put together,” said USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page.

But looking historically, if one wants to talk about the chilling effect an administration had on newspapers, the Lincoln administration was far more radical, said Harold Holzer, author of Lincoln and the Press.

“During the Civil War, I counted nearly 200 newspapers that the Lincoln administration shut down,” Holzer said, including in border states and in large cities such as New York, because they were disloyal to the union-recruitment effort. “Newspapers were barred from the U.S. mail, editors imprisoned.”

When the White House secretly subpoenaed the Associated Press’ telephone records, Page said, a lot of reporters and sources stopped communicating by telephone.

“The stories that are most important in a democracy, where you’re uncovering wrongdoing, where the administration has erred, are the ones that require people to tell you things they’re not supposed to tell you,” Page said. “And this has had a real chilling effect.”

In a wide-ranging discussion of the relationship between the press and the presidency through American history, Page and Holzer were joined on the dais by Ann Compton, who covered the White House for ABC News since the Ford administration before retiring last September, Fox News White House correspondent Ed Henry and Clinton White House spokesman Mike McCurry.

While some may wish for a more genteel era of press relations like during the Eisenhower administration, all of the panelists agreed the natural relationship between the news media and the president must be adversarial.

“We are supposed to be pressing people who are in power, Democrat, Republican, man or now potentially a woman,” Henry said.

But what has changed, McCurry said, is that the adversarial relationship has become acrimonious, where reporters look at everything in a jaundiced way. “That poisons the system,” he said.

The White House has a hard time explaining its policies, McCurry said, when the news media is only interested in scandal.

In the 40 years that Compton covered seven presidents, she said what has changed is the impact of digital media, “where White House aides and reporters have their eyes down on their smartphones.”

Reporters and aides have less personal contact, Compton said. “The White House now feels it can go beyond the press and put out its own story, using the same tools that we do. And that’s not healthy,” she said.

During the Civil War, Holzer said, newspapers were openly partisan toward one party or the other and presidents had official newspapers that got the news first and reaped advertising rewards and political favors.

“Maybe the suspicion in the White House is that partisan journalism reigns again,” Holzer said. “So why should I deal with it?”

The Kalb Report is a joint production of the National Press Club’s Journalism Institute, the University of Maryland University College, the George Washington University, the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center for the Press, Politics and Public Policy. It is underwritten by a grant from the Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.