| Spokesman for Clinton White House: Press briefings “not for the fainthearted” BY SALLY ACHARYA The students in Dana Walker’s journalism class are learning to ask questions. But last week, they heard from someone whose job it is to answer those questions. Mike McCurry, press secretary to President Bill Clinton, spoke to the students and answered their questions about the role of a White House spokesman and the changing nature of the media. Sometimes the best questions can be the simplest and most direct, McCurry told the undergraduates in Walker’s class on interview techniques. Fortunately for a White House spokesperson, he quipped, the reporters in the White House press corps “want to show how smart they are” and have a tendency to construct elaborate multipart questions that leave the door open for the press secretary to pick the single easiest question to answer. It’s harder, he said, when the questions are straightforward. McCurry served as spokesman for the Clinton White House from 1995 to 1998 and has also served as spokesman for the Department of State and a number of high-ranking Democrats, including Senators Patrick Moynihan, John Glenn, and Bob Kerrey. As a press secretary, “you have to be conscious of all the different hats you’re wearing,” he said. Sometimes the spokesperson is simply serving as a conduit for straightforward facts. At other times, it’s a matter of diplomacy. When the spokesperson is articulating a government position, the real audience isn’t the press, but foreign governments. And there are also many times when it’s all about politics. “Lord knows at the White House you’re also a political actor,” he said. “You’re there to build support for the president.” McCurry, who was the face of the White House during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, dealt with contradictions between his own views and the perspective he was bound to take as spokesperson by reminding himself that he wasn’t the one who had been elected, and that no one was really asking for his own thoughts. Much of what is really happening at a press briefing, however, isn’t immediately apparent to the public. A press conference is not a finished product, he notes, but only one step in researching a story, he noted. For that reason, his 1995 decision to allow the daily briefings to be broadcast live was probably a mistake, he now says, because the television audience often misunderstands the dynamics. A good reporter like Sam Donaldson or David Gregory ’92 may try to gauge the sensitivity of a story by pushing the limits and may even needle the press secretary “to see how annoyed you get,” McCurry said. The spokesperson, he said, understands that the reporter is just trying to get a sense of how sensitive the story is within the administration and will keep on digging after the cameras stop running. But to viewers—who may not realize that the conference is just, in effect, one interview—the reporter may simply come across like a jerk. To watch a press conference is to watch a news story being researched, and “it’s like sausage being made. It’s not for the fainthearted,” he said. In fact, he added, the whole notion of daily briefings is probably outdated. “Think of how nineteenth century it is to have one person go out to a podium and answer questions every day,” he said. “That is a hopelessly antiquated way of getting information out.” While press briefings haven’t yet changed, the nature of journalism is altering swiftly. The tradition of objectivity is giving way to opinion journalism in a sweeping change that could either go well and produce a more informed public, or could go “very darkly,” McCurry said. As outlets proliferate, the “great communal campfire” of the evening news, around which the country drew at night to hear the day’s events, is a thing of the past. Opinion columnists and the provocative denizens of the “blogosphere” spin information in their own preferred ways, and the percentage of space allocated to neutral news is decreasing. The result is that people have access to enormous amounts of information, but it is not necessarily the same information. It is increasingly difficult for press officers to get their messages out, he said. One solution to this dilemma, favored by the Bush administration, has been to enforce “message discipline” in essence, picking a message, repeating it continuously, and sticking to it. “There really is a difference between how Democrats and Republicans present information to the public,” he said. The political culture of the Republican party has come out of the advertising field. “They’re good at it, and better at it than Democrats,” he said, adding “scratch a Republican and you find a corporate executive . . . scratch a Democrat, and what do you find? An antiwar activist, a feminist.” Democrats have traditionally been good at grassroots organizing, but also tend to be more open with the press, and possibly more naive. “They think the press would be their friend, because the press are also trying to ‘speak truth to power.’ On the Republican side, they basically say, ‘We will have our story, and we’ll stick to it.’” When McCurry left the White House, CNN’s Howard Kurtz called him “one of the most popular press secretaries in recent history.” He is one of several prominent guest speakers who have met with students in Walker’s School of Communication class, Art and Science of the Interview. |
