Pressed for time.

• Author: Shaw, David
• Position: Interviewing Clinton press advisors

One week in the Clinton White House and you get the sense that the press corps and the press office deserve each other

Friday, July 16: I arrive in Washington mid-morning and call around to arrange interviews for a series of stories for the Los Angeles Times examining media coverage of the Clinton administration. My first calls are to George Stephanopoulos and David Gergen, both senior advisors to Clinton, and to Mark Gearan, the White House director of communications.

None of the three is in his office.

I leave messages and make a few other calls. No one is available. This is the first full day back in Washington for the president and most of the people I want to talk to; his top aides and the reporters who regularly cover him have all just returned from the G-7 economic summit in Tokyo and from a visit to the flood-ravaged Midwest. They're all understandably busy.

I arrange for temporary press credentials and go to the White House press room to see who's around. I see a few familiar faces and introduce myself to several reporters I want to interview next week. I also attend Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers' daily briefing for the White House press corps. The briefing is scheduled for 11:30 a.m.

It starts at 1:13 p.m.

That's typical, I'm told. Nothing at the White House ever starts on time. Clinton is habitually late. So is Gergen. Together, they are setting Guinness Book of World Records standards for tardiness. "Clinton has no concept of the traditional middle-class virtue of not keeping other people waiting," Ann Devroy, a White House correspondent for The Washington Post, tells me. "He is extraordinarily self-absorbed."

I later discover that this helps explain why the press corps was so antagonistic to the Clinton administration in its early months: Clinton's "self-absorption" and the reporters' self-importance collided to produce unprecedentedly hostile feelings and unprecedentedly hostile coverage for a new president so early in his term. There are other factors in the equation as well, of course: Clinton's own missteps and miscalculations, the post-vietnam, post-Watergate cynicism of the press, the tabloidization of the mainstream media. Yet another collision was causing a lot of the friction, this one between Bill Clinton's dilatory decision-making and the media's demand for instant, incremental news. He thinks aloud and his aides pass on the (seemingly) definitive word on this program or that appointment; reporters rush into print and on the air with the scoop - then the president changes his mind and pisses everyone off.

Pissed off is what many White House reporters were before Gergen rode to the rescue in late spring with enough political savvy and ego balm to begin turning things around.

Myers...