Journalists and Their Good Friends in the White House

[Joanne98]

by Glenn Greenwald
The Washington Post’s White House reporter, Michael Abramowitz, was asked yesterday during a chat to name some of his “favorite people who work at the White House but who are not in the spotlight,” and Abramowitz happily and easily offered a long list:

I like your question. One of the things you find in covering the White House is that many of the staff are extremely friendly and dedicated, and it’s fun to get to know some of them. The truth is reporters tend to hang out with the people in the press office, so the names I might give you tend to be lower-level press aides, like Carlton Carroll, Stuart Siciliano and Pete Seat — and spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore. They are extremely helpful to me (and I don’t mean this list to be all-inclusive.)

I also enjoy talking with deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan and deputy national security adviser Jim Jeffrey — I wouldn’t be surprised if Joel is one day a cabinet officer or a CEO somewhere. He has an interesting life story — he joined the Marines after graduating from Harvard, then became a lawyer and is basically the top aide to Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.

Of course, Joel and others I mention are extremely discreet, so it’s not like anyone is really dishing on the president! You need to look elsewhere for that.

That sounds like a really fun and playful circle of friends — just a great, great group of people — and Abramowitz seems to derive much satisfaction from being able to be a part of it. Only a curmudgeon — or some shrill, angry Leftist type that just doesn’t understand How Journalism Works — would begrudge Abramowitz his fun.

But, in theory at least, White House press officials are the principal impediments to a White House reporter’s being able to do his job. The core function of the White House press officials with whom Abramowitz loves to “hang out” and of whom he is obviously so fond is to manipulate his reporting in favor of the White House, to conceal or distort facts that are incriminating of the President, to disseminate narratives that promote the Government’s goals. That’s true in general, and particularly so for the most secretive and manipulative White House in modern American history. For that reason, healthy “watchdog” journalism would dictate that such officials are viewed with suspicion, that the relationship would be far more adversarial than affectionate, that reporters would speak of such officials dispassionately rather than gushing with the kind of personal praise one generally reserves for one’s dearest friends and closest colleagues.

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/20/11099/

[grasswire]

1. Is that Emily the one who mis-managed Colin Powell?

See my sig.

Is it that Emily?