Getting Past the Spin.

• Author: McCurry, Michael D.

The press could do better--but so could government spokesmen

Recently at one of those chin-stroking sessions about how the press can do a better job of covering government, I piped up and said, "Well, it might help a bit if the government did a better job of telling its story in the first place" In the days since, I have been thinking more seriously about this idea. In nearly four years as White House Press Secretary and in the half-year since I left the government, I've been asked to participate in many discussions about how the work of government gets reported to the American people. Not one invitation, though, has called for me to critique the way government makes its information available.

As Donald Kettl writes in this issue, press coverage of the executive branch has dropped significantly in recent years. When reporters do cover government, they're likely to view it through the distorting lens of "scandal," or for a local angle that might be of interest in a particular community. The bigger job of telling readers what the government does, and why, too often falls to the wayside.

How can it be that America gets less reporting about the day-to-day work of the government when, thanks to the revolutionary advance of communication technologies, we are living through an eye-popping explosion in the volume of information available? The answer is in line with a lesson taught by my former boss, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In a witty essay, "The Iron Law of Emulation," he postulates that organizations in conflict become similar to one another. Over time, navies, football teams, political parties, and yes, adversaries like the press and politicians begin to mimic the tactics of the other even as they continue their combat.

How true. As news organizations in the nation's capital assigned specialists to concentrate on investigative pieces on presidential scandals, we at the White House found lawyers in the Counsel's Office to do media relations. Lanny Davis' new book, Truth to Tell, describes the results of the curiously symbiotic relationship that developed between the two groups.

In vast areas where the press showed less interest, the White House proved to be much more ho-hum about putting forth public information. Mind you, we scoured the agencies and departments for interesting tidbits every morning. If you had to face a pride of lions licking their chops for Lewinsky at noon, wouldn't you want to open the daily press briefing with a detailed discussion of the latest wrinkle in federal pension policy? These sessions irritated reporters but often generated requests for more information from citizens who caught a glimpse of something that might actually matter. No systematic method developed for getting these important but less-sizzling tidbits to the public.

In the main, the job of assembling information about the government's work fell to the individual agencies and their public affairs staffs. Some were good at it, but most struggled. Without a captive press corps braying at the door, there was less pressure for them to tell their stories.

Then again, some preferred anonymity. When the Congress went Republican in 1995, many agencies were suddenly barraged with requests for data and information from the Hill that began to look suspect. You didn't have to look hard to see a pattern of harassment, and before long, memos from the GOP leadership staff leaked to the press confirming that "diligent oversight" could be a euphemism for clipping the wings of an activist Democratic president. Many administration public affairs officers (and their bosses) were content to avoid any notice, lest a "meanie" Republican congressional oversight committee take interest.

This is no way to run a government. "Democracy is not a matter of entertainment, it's a matter of engagement," write John Herbers and James McCartney in a recent American Journalism Review survey documenting the decreased press coverage of government. "The Constitution requires close citizen attention if the grand experiment is to continue to work." The brave media critic Tom Rosenstiel (full disclosure: my friend from high school) directs the Program for Excellence in Journalism and often says "journalism is a series of commitments, a series of responsibilities. It's about being accurate, being courageous, telling people things that are important as well as interesting, finding ways to make the important interesting." The Pew Charitable Trust's Rebecca Rimel, a Joan of Arc for better journalism who funds work like Rosenstiel's, writes that...