It seems the more obsessed President Clinton becomes with adverse media coverage, the worse it gets. Clinton has made it clear that he feels the media is overlooking his accomplishments and focusing on "personal, demeaning attacks."
At his recently televised news conference, the president ticked off a list of success stories for which the adminisration should be given credit, such as a booming economy. A week later Clinton's popularity sank even further in public opinion polls. The White House appears to be suffering from spin contraol burn out.
Lyndon Johnson had a huge oval-shaped, polished wood cabinet specially crafted for, yes, the Oval Office, with three built-in television sets, permitting him to personally monitor the network news programs simultaneously each night. Switching among the channels, with one hand on the remote unit and the other on the telephone, the president would call an offending network to complain, such as the night he telephoned CBS when audience applause was clipped after one of his speech segments on Vietnam.
Richard Nixon was on the phone all weekend March 6-7, 1971, schmoozing off the air with local TV anchormen in Birmingham, Rochester, and San Francisco, among other places. In a memo to Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman, Nixon said the calls "took a little longer than expected...because they want to chat, and there's nothing I can do to turn them off." But Nixon felt it was important for him to reach "more people on the TV side" because they were influential in their respective markets. He ordered Haldeman to put together "a study determining who the big man is on television in each market, who is for us...also the radio talk show guys and that sort of thing."
And before TV satellites became commonplace, Nixon traveled the country to hold regional briefings for newspaper editors, in an attempt to go over the heads of the Washington press corps. In the end, the anchorman in Rochester wasn't of much help.
John F. Kennedy also felt abused by the national press. He once remarked to Ben Bradlee of The Washington Post, "Well, I always said that when we don't have to go through the bastards, we can reallty get the story out to the American people."
Ronald Reagan was a master of the media, but left the monitoring of the nightly news broadcasts to his staff. He once remarked that he preferred to watch movies on his TV, and instead of watching CNN he napped. He also completed two terms in office.
Los Angeles Times correspondent Tom Rosenstiel counts up that President Clinton did 161 local TV interviews during his first years in office. Clinton sits in his office and talks via satellite with TV anchors thousands of miles away as if they were in the same room.
Instant, intimate communication via satellites provides the ultimate trip for Washington spin masters: a hermitically sealed device that delivers a staight out unfiltered message direct from the commander-in-chief to an individual on the other end, and to mass numbers of viewers looking in. It also enables uncut presidential speeches and news conferences to be satellited by the White House, without offending analyses by journalists. And through regional town meetings, the president addresses regional concerns and issues in a way that would not be possible in a traditional White House news conference.
Clinton, however, made no attempts to bypass the national media; he has held 45 news conferences during his first year in office, although aide George Stephanopolous once remarked that he didn't want the White House Press "loitering" outside his door.
In fact Bill Clinton has been the most media-accessible president in modern history. He also had the shortest honeymoon with the press since William Henry Harrison caught cold on inauguration day and died. Bill Clinton didn't even have a wedding night. Accessibility, laudable as it is, doesn't necessarily translate into popularity.
With each new administration, the Office of Communications, the spin control center of the White House, grows ever larger and seemingly less effective.
Before there were TV satellites, home computers, fax machines and a White House Office of Communications, presidential press secretary Jim Hagerty and a handful of others dealt with the media pretty effectively on behalf of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Often simple is better, and this may be the best thing that can happen to Clinton's media relations.