Cintra Wilson shares an excellent reporter’s-eye-view of Scott McClellan’s sweaty days in July, when the Whitehouse Press Corps actually kinda sorta did their jobs.
In her Salon article “I invaded the White House press corps”, Wilson gives a day-by-day account of the Press Corps’ “minor mutiny” …
On July 11, the story of Karl Rove’s involvement in the Valerie Plame case broke, and the hounds got loose in the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House and whomped on the press secretary. It was the Great McClellan Mauling of ’05: Thirty-five questions about Karl Rove by a suddenly unified and frothy White House press corps that had quickened into a minor mutiny.
July 11, the Day the Press Corps Attacked, was just the kickoff. I spent the next two weeks in the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House, witnessing the molten Rove-a-thon. By the end I felt like I’d spent a couple of weeks on one of those indoor thrill rides where seats are bolted to a moving floor while a film is shown, creating a vague sensation of G-force when nothing actually goes anywhere. Still, the mini-revolt offered hope that despite its previously persistent vegetative state, the press might not be entirely dead yet. For the first time since 9/11, the reporters got nakedly hostile and went for the throat. Pandora’s box opened — just a hairline crack, but enough bats flew out to suggest that it might not close all the way again.
Not content to cheer the Press Corps on from the sidelines, Wilson decided to join the fun:
As fans of Talon News reporter Jim “Jeff” Guckert “Gannon” know, it is surprisingly easy to get into the briefing room — any no-account hosebag (myself obviously included) can mock up enough credentials to have their questions unanswered by Scott McClellan. (I met a lawyer in one of the back seats who manufactured his own press card at Kinko’s.) With a laminated press pass and a little tenacious badgering of the White House Office of Media Affairs, I was cleared to take my seat in the amphitheater and watch lions chew an unlucky Christian.
Unused to getting BS straight from a firehose, her first exposure to Scotty was a little hard to take:
McClellan kicked off the day with a batch of statements that were such an absurdly Orwellian valentine to the administration, I thought he was delivering a blatant “up yours” to his bloodthirsty audience. However, I was assured by veteran corps members that this was business as usual; even when the president is being led away in handcuffs, you can count on the press secretary to stand tall, show clean teeth, and deliver good news about how the administration is Doing Great Things for the American People.
…
Since this was my first exposure, in real time, to the administration’s spin jingo, straight from the larynx of a living person, I was so stunned I emitted an involuntarily, hysterical gasp and one of McClellan’s frozen über-blondes tried to turn me into a pillar of salt with a penetrating fish-eye.
Wilson’s report from the front lines — well, the back seat — of the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room is entertaining and educational, both for the bits of context she provides for the official transcript and for the reality-checks she gets from the other attendees:
“You get frustrated, and you think it’s like nailing mercury to a wall, and then you realize that it’s not because Scott is so masterfully evasive, but because the White House declines to provide any mercury, or a wall, ” a reporter who insisted on anonymity told me after the briefing. And this was a guy from a major conservative news outlet, one person who I thought would have some mechanism for making sense of it all, however delusional.
The biting insights she gets from Helen Thomas are unsurprisingly the most interesting:
Thomas is so candid, direct and honest that listening to her is as jarringly refreshing as sitting under a cold waterfall, after a few days in the corps.
“Reporters have not done their job,” Thomas said. “They’ve given [Bush] a free pass and they’ve let the people down. They haven’t been watchdogs, but lapdogs.
“The press officer has to wear two hats. True, he speaks for the president … [But] he also, through the press, has to give the truth back to the American people.
Hell, just go read the whole thing. If you like it as much as I did, come back here and kick it around.
(Note: If you follow the link to read the Salon story in its entirety, you’ll either need a Salon subscription or you’ll need to watch a soul-sucking (but mercifully brief) advertisement.)