It will not end with Ryan Lizza, the Washington Times, New York Post, and Dallas Morning News getting kicked off the campaign plane, if this profile of the prospective press secretary is to be believed. They call Robert Gibbs the "Barack Whisperer," which reveals that he a) has a very close strategist relationship with the president-elect and that b) he should have Obama's very capable speech writers come up with his nicknames (The "Barack Whisperer" doesn't exactly roll off the tongues. "Boss Whisperer," maybe?). On the trail, Gibbs got more guarded as his status rose, shouting matches with reporters were not uncommon, and critical reporters (such that they were) could be frozen out by the spokesman for weeks at a time. If you're wondering what it takes to get on Gibbs' bad side, the answer is not much. Dean Reynolds of CBS, who wrote the much-linked account of Obama's gamy campaign plane, received a "rather tendentious note" from Gibbs. Gibbs said later the piece hurt staff's feelings and raised issues the reporter did not raise in person. Well, then. In the Obama White House, presumably critical reporters will have to say everything they write "to his face" before they write it. Another way to get Gibbs' censure, apparently, is to veer from unfailingly fawning coverage for even one instant, as Newsweek had the gall to do in one or two of its Obama cover stories throughout the year.
Last spring, when Newsweek ran a cover portraying Obama as the elitist "arugula" candidate, followed weeks later by a cover story in which editor Evan Thomas wrote Obama an open memo on dealing with race, the campaign suddenly stopped cooperating with the magazine's quadrennial book project, which requires behind-the-scenes access. Thomas had to fly to Detroit and try to assuage Gibbs during a campaign flight before access was restored. "I thought the Obama campaign was overreacting to those two covers," Thomas says. "They thought we were overly concerned with race." In light of the election, "maybe they were right."
The magazine covers in question are "Obama's Bubba Gap" of May 5, 2008 and "Obama, Race, and Us" of June 2. The "Bubba Gap" cover was, perhaps, the most critical of the 11- count 'em, 11!- covers that featured Barack Obama over the past two years. Three of those covers featured him with others- one with Hillary, one with Biden, and one with McCain- but the rest featured him alone, and most were utterly positive. Click through this slide show to see the scathing coverage that warranted Gibbs' freeze-out: "The O Team," "What He Believes," and "When Barry Became Barack," among them. As we saw throughout the campaign, the Obama team is a disciplined message machine that puts a premium on loyalty and limits access, in much the same style the Bush administration has been maligned for. Because the press is predisposed to like Obama, his arm's-length treatment of the press never became the story, as it did about the McCain and Palin camps, which allowed Gibbs to punish press members for slights both tiny and imagined. It will continue in the White House. This paragraph makes me lament the lack of a similar figure in the Bush White House:
He also monitors coverage intensively, pushing back against the smallest blog post he considers inaccurate.
In the late years of the Bush administration, the relationship with press has remained contentious, but without systematic push-back on controversial issues such as pre-war intelligence, even though press coverage pushed much more problematic memes than the "Bubba Gap." Sounds like the Obama administration won't be making such mistakes. Will they ever go far enough in limiting access and punishing critics to turn off the journalists who love them so? Yeah, I won't hold my breath.