When President George Bush’s live TV press conference last Tuesday, April 13, was done, Terry Moran, the 44-year-old White House correspondent for ABC News, had some regrets. He had asked Mr. Bush if he cared to explain how it happened that we had gone to war based on "false premises," a pretty direct inquiry—and yet Mr. Moran went away feeling … complicit.
"We need people who are not polite," he said. "We need to be more representative of America.
"I am what I am," he said, "a Midwestern Catholic boy whose mama raised him to be courteous to Presidents, nuns, sales clerks, doormen …. I don’t holler, because it would be fake for me. But I sure wish someone did in there."
Mr. Moran then said the White House press corps was sorely lacking someone like his predecessor on the beat, former ABC News White House correspondent Sam Donaldson, whose wild-man behavior and raucous, crazy-eyed bark had once been 120-grit sandpaper to Presidents Carter, Reagan and Clinton.
"I just wonder if our generation of White House correspondents has that grit and that character," Mr. Moran said. "I don’t think you can expect the reporters in that room to fake it. I think that’s the worst thing you can do. But the more diversity, the better. It would throw the public official off-balance a little more. If they had to come to grips with a number of different voices, that would help extract information."
Considering the reams of damning new information at hand that night in the East Room—from former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke’s published revelations, to the findings of the 9/11 commission, to the news of escalating violence in Iraq—Mr. Moran said the press had taken a dive. Mr. Bush did his thing—he filibustered, deflected, stonewalled, recycled the company line—and the press watched, silent, as if afraid that if they showed bad manners, Karl Rove would never schedule another press conference. After all, the White House has effectively controlled the press by limiting televised news conferences—the fewest of any Presidency in history—which has had the effect of charging the one on April 13 with a certain high-noon theatricality. That night, each question had to be sweated over as if it was a rare event—since it was. But that very tension led partisans to react as if the press were a bunch of liberals playing "We Got Bush."
But Mr. Moran said the Washington press corps’ social makeup—he called it mostly white, suburban, upper-middle class—reflected a genial group for whom noisy, baiting, choleric behavior didn’t come naturally. And others have brought up mass professional ambition as the grease that keeps the Washington press corps from getting too loud. As in: The squeaky wheel doesn’t get the story.
http://www.observer.com/pages/frontpage3.asp
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