HOW THE WHITE HOUSE CENSORS AND MANIPULATES THE NEWS YOU GET - Worst part is that journalists are complying with this

Main points:

WH Press Secretary Josh Earnest (Getty)

• The White House press-pool consists of reporters representing the whole media.  Their reports are passed on to other media.
• Poolers are chosen on a rotating basis from among regular White House correspondents, and they typically get more favorable access to presidential events to provide coverage that is shared with other reporters.
• White House press-pool media reports must be sent to the White House press office for distribution.
• However, the White House goes beyond this and proceeds to censor certain reports outright.  If changes are not made as requested, they don't get distributed. Period.

By Paul Farhi - The Washington Post

White House press-pool reports are supposed to be the news media’s eyes and ears on the president, an independent chronicle of his public activities. They are written by reporters for other reporters, who incorporate them into news articles about President Obama almost every day.  Sometimes, however, the White House plays an unseen role in shaping the story.

 

Journalists who cover the White House say Obama’s press aides have demanded — and received — changes in press-pool reports before the reports have been disseminated to other journalists. They say the White House has used its unusual role as the distributor of the reports as leverage to steer coverage in a more favorable direction.

 

The disputed episodes involve mostly trivial issues and minor matters of fact. But that the White House has become involved at all represents a troubling trend for journalists and has prompted their main representative, the White House Correspondents’ Association, to consider revising its approach to pool reporting.

 

The decades-old White House press pool was created as a practical compromise between the news media and the nation’s chief executive: Instead of having a mob of journalists jostling to cover the president at every semi-public function, a handful of reporters are designated to act as proxies, or “poolers,” for the entire press corps.

 

Poolers are chosen on a rotating basis from among regular White House correspondents, and they typically get more favorable access to presidential events to provide coverage that is shared with other reporters.

 

But before a pool report lands in anyone’s inbox, pool reporters take an interim step. They send their files to the White House press office, which forwards them via e-mail to a database of thousands of recipients, including news outlets, federal agencies and congressional offices. This two-step process enables White House staffers to read the pool reports — and potentially object to them — before press aides send them to recipients.

 

While the overwhelming majority of pool reports pass through the White House without delay or amendment, some have been flagged by the administration’s press staff, which has demanded changes as a condition of distributing them.

 

When Anita Kumar of the McClatchy newspaper chain covered Obama’s appearance on “The Tonight Show” for the press pool last year, she wrote a detailed account of the taped program. Kumar thought her story would be sent to pool recipients hours before the show aired.

 

Instead, White House press staffers objected to the length of her file, saying it violated an agreement with the program’s producers to limit advance publicity. They told Kumar to pare down her account before they would distribute it.

 

Kumar reluctantly complied, but the request made her uneasy. “The worry is that when you send in a pool report, the White House is reading it and approving it,” she said.

 

Other journalists tell similar tales about White House objections.

 

As the pool reporter on a presidential trip to California in mid-2012, Todd Gillman of the Dallas Morning News included a colorful scene in his pool file: Obama walking back to the press section of Air Force One bearing a dessert with a lighted candle to honor a veteran reporter who was making her final presidential trip.

 

Gillman added the seemingly innocuous detail that Obama asked the honoree to blow out the candle and make a wish, “preferably one that had something to do with the number 270,” the minimum number of electoral college votes the president needed to win reelection.

 

A press aide, whom Gillman declined to identify, asserted that the details of this scene were off the record and refused to distribute Gillman’s account. Only after Gillman appealed to then-press secretary Jay Carney was the report finally sent — a day after the fact and long after reporters’ deadlines had passed.

On another occasion, in 2011, Carney himself objected to a pool report that included a mention of first lady Michelle Obama working out at a hotel gym during a presidential trip to Asia. Carney told the pool reporter, David Nakamura of The Washington Post, that the workout was part of the first lady’s personal time and therefore off limits to reporters. Nakamura disagreed but reluctantly deleted the line to ensure that his report would be sent.

 

During the same trip, then-deputy press secretary Josh Earnest flagged another of Nakamura’s reports. This one contained a comment juxtaposing a speech Obama had given two days earlier lauding freedom of the press with the administration’s decision to limit access to presidential photo ops on the trip.

 

Earnest, who succeeded Carney as press secretary in May, considered Nakamura’s comparison unfair and asked him to take it out, according to Nakamura. After an argument, the reporter acquiesced.

 

Several veteran journalists say their pool reports have sailed through the White House without incident. Peter Baker, a New York Times White House reporter, said the only input from a presidential press aide that he’s ever gotten while on pool duty was help with his spelling or a factual error.

 

In decades of reporting on the White House, Tom DeFrank, contributing editor of the National Journal, said he’s been asked by aides to change something in a pool report only once — during the Ford administration. He refused.

 

Source - http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/reporters-say-white-house-sometimes-demands-changes-to-press-pool-reports/2014/09/23/e5e6fec8-42d9-11e4-9a15-137aa0153527_story.html

 

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