June 8, 2003

President Bush’s press conferences are nothing but repetition and the press lets Bush get away with it. Why? Because if you ask tough questions, the White House does not invite you again

“Are you reporters or sheep”? shot an angry woman from the audience. Bristled another: “Why can’t you so-called journalists ask tough questions of Bush?” Thundered the third: “Why the heck do you all look so depressed, downcast and so very timid?”

Such public ventilation feeds the rage of angry Americans — malcontent and frustrated at the US becoming an empire and they losing their civil liberties.

At the receiving end were — in particular — Michael Oreskes, assistant managing editor of the New York Times (NYT) and columnist Joe Klein of Time magazine. Both were driving defensive, steering clear of trouble, while pussyfooting the topic of the evening: ‘Presidential Coverage — and Cover-ups’ hosted by NYT (at $40 a head!) at New York University in mid-town Manhattan.

‘Times Talks’ newly introduced by NYT had also invited political liberal David Gergen and Alexandra Pelosi, a TV producer for an “extraordinary conversation with journalist (Oreskes) from the New York Times”. (This of course was weeks before NYT’s con reporters Jayson Blair and Rick Bragg serialized “America’s newspaper of record” into a deformed joke.)

“We’ve been frozen out,” keened Joe Klein to the audience. Come on... stop this fatuous cringing. Can one really take him seriously? He’s the same character called “Anonymous”, who threw journalistic ethics to the wind and exposed his one time boss Clinton — the then President — in his runaway bestseller Primary Colours. Klein chronicled Clinton for his “womanizing, lawyering, fudging, misdirection, obfuscation and generally slouchy behaviour.” The tempest-tossed Capitol Hill failed to track him down until Washington Post, employing the most sophisticated sleuths, closed in on Joe Klein and forced him to come clean.

Instead of being banished for his high jinks, Klein went on to dizzier heights and became the darling of media conglomerates like The New Yorker, Newsweek and now the Time. And guess what? Recently, at a dinner, I caught him sedulously shadowing Clinton and when he finally grabbed his attention, Klein kept whispering in his ear for a good 10-15 minutes! Wonder what the once Clintonphile-turned-Brutus was now proposing to the man he had stabbed? Clinton by the way, listened on with rapt attention.

It was the same fellow who in the words of Clinton’s former press secretary, “traded his journalistic credibility for 30 pieces of silver”.

Jayson Blair, the hotshot African American wunderkind, whose fabricated and plagiarized stories were front-paged by NYT editors, and now when finally fired from NYT has received offers from publishers and movie moguls to tell his side of the story! The dirty little secret: it’s only in this country that cross-fertilization between falsehood and fame catapults the offender into an instant celebrity status with truckloads of money.

Not surprisingly then, the DNA of ordinary Americans is oozing out revulsion. And can one blame them?

On the Bush 2000 campaign trail, photographer Alexandra Pelosi in her “Journeys with George” shot hours of invaluable footage inside the press corps plane that shuttled ‘power-struck scribes from one meticulously orchestrated event to another’. Pelosi — the daughter of House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi — was told by Bush: “If I lose, you’re out of work, baby. You’re off the plane, baby.”

Of course George Dubya won — thanks to the US Supreme Court. But he made sure Pelosi was refused access to him! No wonder now the young Alexandra (who has the same dainty chiselled features and the battle garb as her mom Nancy) tells the audience that “access is the real currency for journalists — if you ask tough questions, the White House does not invite you again, the TV networks in turn drop you and you are then left out in the cold.”

Fearless Maureen Dowd of NYT may also become a casualty of the White House witch hunters who are calling for her blood, saying that she quoted Bush out of context.

As an outcast, Dowd could join Pelosi who has nothing to lose by making more fun of George W: “I don’t think the man works much in a day. He appears so dumb.”

Jumps in Klein: “It’s a mystification to me how Bush makes all these decisions!” The crowd bursts into laughter and claps.

David Gergen, editor-at-large at US News & World Reports, a graduate of Yale and the Harvard Law School, comes across as a seasoned Bush critic: “I can’t remember in the history of US an international crisis as serious as the one we’re facing today. Bush’s press conferences are nothing but repetition, repetition — same phrases, certitude and convoluted and impervious to depth.” The press corps is like peacocks who let the “empty-headed” Bush get away with: “Hey guys, I’ve got my list of reporters whom I’ll call upon to ask me questions... I’m the man and it’s my press conference!” “I get phone calls from the White House when I write something against Bush. It’s very tough and I’m just a columnist who picks up my own spots and interviewees. I feel sorry for the reporters locked up in the claustrophobic press room which used to be the White House swimming pool once and still smells like a locker room!”

Correct. I also remember a beaten down vending soda and coffee machine from where one yanked out a drink or a snack, because for the hacks, there was not a drop to drink or a crumb to eat — gratis — in the rarefied mansion of the world’s most powerful man of the wealthiest country.

And yet the White House is so dependent on the press to get its message out.

“When I worked for Clinton in 1993”, said Klein, “We carefully went through the CIA plan to fire a missile on Iraqi targets responsible for an assassination attempt on George Bush senior. The missiles were to hit at 4pm on a Saturday to coordinate with the 6 o’clock evening news on American networks along with Clinton’s statement. CNN didn’t carry anything and a red-in-the-face Clinton called up its president Tom Johnson at 6.45, who was out for dinner. When we eventually got to Tom, he said, “We don’t have a correspondent in Baghdad and I can’t say how soon we can get our man out there!”

To the audience, at the end, Joe Klein — criticized for being skittish — got his back: “All of you here have grey hair. You’re all old. I am shocked and disappointed at the absence of young people! Where are they? Don’t they think they have a high stake in the future of America?”

That indeed is the sad reality. Whenever, I go to such events, the average age of the audience is around 50 plus. Most of them look retired, who must have loads of time (and money) for a spot of intellectual interaction (and fireworks).

Walking up to David Gergen, whom one sees often on TV, I asked him: “You sounded a note of warning — a shift, a sea change in American foreign policy that is being pushed by the administration’s armchair hawks — to dump Europe, NATO and form new alliances, new allies and friends?”

“Absolutely,” his eyes glowered, “it is a very dangerous game that Bush is playing and, unfortunately, the media who have a role to play has an all-American perspective, with very little understanding of the world outside the US.”

The only country mentioned (if I remember correctly) throughout the evening was Pakistan. Michael Oreskes told the audience of Sharmeen Obaid’s “great” documentary film Terror’s Children — of kids on the streets of Karachi — scheduled to air on the new Discovery-Times channel.

Going up to the bearded short-statured Klein, I asked why Eric Alterman, the author of the much-talked about book What Liberal Media had attacked Klein and wondered why the New Yorker chose him as their columnist.

“He’s a jerk!” Klein snorted with an attitude and moved away.

While walking out of the hallway, I heard one unhappy attendee say: “They never let us ask questions — it’s just like group therapy, when you start to warm up, they end the session.”

Helen Goldberg must know for she is a psychotherapist!

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