I never expected McClellan to write a book about being the jerk at the podium for Bush, or to make connections between his experience and the larger wreckage of the Bush presidency. But he's done just that.
At PressThink, Jay Rosen takes a long view of Scott McClellan: He notes with surprise that McClellan sees himself as Jay Rosen saw him at the time of his resignation (The Jerk at the Podium: Scott McClellan Steps Away). But Rosen examines the current furor through a hundred-year-long lens, going back to the beginning of the White House Press Corps under Teddy Roosevelt.
Rosen begins with McClellan's appearance on The Today Show [emphasis + links in original]:
McClellan’s story (in my paraphrase)…
I was stupid, I allowed myself to be fooled by them. I was misled. I was misguided by the people who were supposed to guide me so I don’t die out there. I trusted the wrong people, but they were the top people. I see now that I was the public speaking part of a propaganda mission. The people running it let me lie for them. They destroyed their own press secretary when they did that. The American people rejected us because we didn’t level with them. I know, because I was the one not leveling….
And just below the surface of the words. A dream I had about public service died inside when I lied for you from the White House podium. I blame myself for not seeing that. And now I turn to your part in those events.
I never expected McClellan to write a book about being the jerk at the podium for Bush, or to make connections between his experience and the larger wreckage of the Bush presidency. He’s not only done that; he’s clearly ready to hit the circuit and explain himself. So to the wave of commentary here and coming, I offer another step back: a hundred-year perspective on this week’s events. The ruining of Scott McClellan was part of something way bigger, and to understand it we have to go back to the beginning of the White House press corps.
From there, Rosen traces the beginnings of the White House Press Corps (WHPC) during Teddy Roosevelt's administration, helped by a remodel of the White House. Bring the press in, and let the President have a kind of overwhelming national power of narrative and, in the three branches of government, more power in fact. Roosevelt liked reporters, and the result of this new arrangement was that the press and the president were both glamorized.
Historic Did You Know? Before that time, the branch with the greatest power was Congress. Interesting implications for media and coverage, and attention. Worthy of a diary in its own right.
Rosen argues that this period lasted for 100 years, until the Bush presidency. A commenter to Rosen's post noted the historic decline of the press for some decades (going back to Nixon), making conditions ripe for what the Bush administration did.
Rosen:
Sensing an institution in decline and uncomfortable with interlocutors of any type, [the Bush administration] decided to return the press to where it stood before McKinley [the president before Roosevelt, where press had access, but on the street instead of inside]: effectively out in the cold. But they didn’t go all the way and actually expel reporters from the executive mansion, which would have alerted the country—and the press—to something extreme going on.
Instead the Administration decided to innovate in other ways. It denied the whole theory of the “fourth estate,” ridiculed the idea that the press is part of the system of checks and balances, told reporters they were a special interest group rather than a conduit to the public-at-large, wiped out all remaining distinctions between propaganda and public information, and welcomed the de-legitimizing of the news media by allies in the culture war. [emphasis mine, links in original]
And installed someone who was basically a stooge, one Scott McClellan. Loyal, but lacking any true insider knowledge.
The century-long arc of how the White House views the WHPC:
From "dominating the national stage" ---> controlling the President's image ---> news management ---> (now, in the Bush admin) preserving power by not explaining and not inviting questions.
The result:
Strategic non-communication was the best name I could come up with for this approach. It was a staggering gamble and of course it failed on every front, especially the one most important to Bush: public support for the war in Iraq.
it got to the point that a Republican congressman told the White House that they lost credibility and if they wanted to communicated to the public, word would have to come from Petraeus. The White House couldn't speak of its own accord.
And here, Rosen brings in one of McClellan's points that have been highlighted by others -- A White House continually in campaign mode, and how that led to a lack of reflection and compromise when it came to matters of governance. The culture war and that damned libr'ul media drove the White House to erect a wall separating it from the outside world. Rosen quotes McClellan:
“Unfortunately, the press secretary at times found himself outside those walls as well.”
It wasn’t by accident. When Roosevelt welcomed the press in from the cold, he was agreeing that the modern presidency needed an interlocutor, and would benefit by having a official one on hand. It was exactly this premise that Bush and Cheney rejected, as part of a larger project, creating a more unfettered presidency all around, less accountable to other parts of the system. They wanted the lights to go out on the idea of answering questions from an unpersuaded press. They chose McClelland as the dimmer, and he was dumb enough to let them.
But I don’t think they calculated well.
So concludes Jay Rosen (but what's cool is that in time he'll add to his post with good aftermatter from reactions elsewhere and in the comments. So really, go there and read the whole thing)
Rosen's Hundred Year View opens up the examination of the press reactions and (lack of) mea culpas that are being enthusiastically reported on in various blogs.
Elsewhere, Rosen brings up a three-legged stool:
a triangular relationship among journalists, the Administration and the public. Each leg—the President and the American people, the White House and the press, the press and the public—counts.
So to fully understand what happened in this instance, I think it's helpful to get a long perspective on how the press views itself and the American people, and the long view of how the American people view the White House and the Press.
I think that the reactions of alleged journalists (David Gregory and Tom Brokaw, on the one hand... and McClatchey's Landay, Strobel and Youssef on the other) might fit into this long historic arc of how these news media see themselves.
For that matter, whether or not McClellan's revelations resonate with the American public (in places other than DKos & similar places) is also affected by the changes in how the American public views itself, the White House and the news media. Well, that, and outrage fatigue.