By Menachem Wecker
“If I make an assumption that most presidents really don’t like the press – I think it was Richard Nixon who said, ‘The press is the enemy’ – was there ever a president who really liked and enjoyed the press?” asked Marvin Kalb, host of the Kalb Report.
It was the perfect introduction to the program titled “Scoops and Scandals: Two Centuries of Presidents and the Press” at the National Press Club Monday night, which addressed everything from Abraham Lincoln’s War Department controlling the telegraph to the “folklore” of George Washington and the awe he inspired walking into a room.
Mr. Kalb’s guests on the program were Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at Rice University; Sam Donaldson, a longtime ABC News reporter and anchor; and Martha Joynt Kumar, professor of political science at Towson University.
Dr. Kumar cited Gerald R. Ford as a president who was “always very willing to talk to reporters.”
Journalist Tom DeFrank once asked then-Vice President Ford for a way to reach him for future stories. “So Ford gave a number. And he said, ‘Who will it be who answers?’” said Dr. Kumar. Mr. Ford responded, “Me. It’s my phone.”
According to Dr. Brinkley, presidents like the members of the press who are friendly to them. “There is a risk involved with the media,” he said, noting that for many presidents, speaking with reporters involves exposing themselves.
Dr. Brinkley said Teddy Roosevelt, “who was such a great writer himself” and considered himself “an honorary scribe,” liked the press.
“But supposing they didn’t write what he wanted them to?” asked Mr. Kalb.
“He’d slay them,” Dr. Brinkley said.
Mr. Donaldson discussed a different president who was comfortable with reporters.
“Ronald Reagan sort of liked us because he was sure of himself, and he thought he could handle us,” he said. “He played off us. He used us. Unwittingly, I was often Mr. Reagan’s straight man.”
However Presidents Lincoln and Washington (who canceled all 30 of his newspaper subscriptions the day he took office) handled the press, modern technology has allowed presidents to reach larger and larger audiences, said Mr. Kalb, from Presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt (radio) to Reagan and John F. Kennedy (television) and Barack Obama (internet).
“What’s the point of it all?” asked Mr. Kalb. “Is it that the presidents are simply using the new technology because it’s there to advance their own cause, or are they also using that technology to go above the reporter to the people and sort of make the reporter irrelevant to the process of communicating a message directly to the public?”
“The president has always felt that he has the right to get to the public,” said Dr. Kumar, “and so he wants the most direct route possible”
Dr. Kumar cited Dwight D. Eisenhower’s press conferences as direct appeals to the people. Mr. Donaldson added that President Eisenhower’s press secretary Jim Hagerty used to tell reporters which video clips they could use from the conferences, which weren’t live.
“We in television – I was not present myself but I take responsibility for my colleagues – thought that was fine. We had no choice,” said Mr. Donaldson. “And one of the reasons was President Eisenhower could not put together an English sentence always that had a verb and a direct object, so [Mr. Hagerty] wanted to save the syntax.”
Other topics addressed in the program were patriotism during the Vietnam War, the White House’s blog, Watergate and fact checking in the digital era. Throughout, Mr. Kalb teased out a consistent pattern of scoops and scandals.
“Presidents have always tried to control the message while the press, at best, maintains a healthy skepticism and holds the feet of those in power to the fire,” said Michael Freedman, executive producer of the Kalb Report, professor of media and public affairs and executive director of GW’s Global Media Institute.
“Over the course of time, this has resulted in an ongoing contentious relationship that has benefitted our democracy. The advice to future presidents was simple: don’t lie,” he said. “The advice to aspiring journalists was equally succinct: study history because it has a way of repeating itself. Both great lessons for presidents, the press and all of us.”
The Kalb Report, which is produced by GW’s Global Media Institute, the National Press Club and Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, is funded by a grant from Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation.