Customer Reviews

Feeding the Beast: The White House Versus the Press

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Many Americans have grown increasingly disenchanted with the quality of national news coverage and journalist Kenneth Walsh is one of them. Taking aim at the vindictiveness and sensationalism that pervades coverage of the White House in particular, Walsh attributes much of the blame, not surprisingly, to shorter news cycles that encourage reporters to "advance the story" with "hard-edged" analysis and predictions, fierce competition for ratings, and the public's appetite for entertainment over hard news. The strength of the book, I believe, lies in his interviews with White House reporters and network news anchors. Their reactions to Walsh's questions struck me as running the gamut from surprisingly self-aware and candid to hopelessly defensive, sarcastic and naive. The weaknesses of the book, while not outweighing the strengths, are manifold. Walsh takes too much time to detail how, at the outset, Clinton and his youthful press secretaries needlessly antagonized the press; in the end, he concedes that Clinton's aversion to "gotcha" journalism is well-founded, and that even deft handling of the White House press would have done little to curb rampant negativism. And while he criticizes the Clintons for failing to reveal enough of their private personas to the media, Walsh also acknowledges that the unquenchable press appetite for this sort of information exceeds the limits of human toleration. My most serious reservations concern the author's conclusions. After identifying the competitive pressures that drive the news business, Walsh seems to forget about them as he lamely calls on journalists to restore professional standards. And although many would agree with him that Washington reporters often seem out of touch with the public, his cliched recommendation that reporters reconnect with the "real" America, MIddle America, seems to contravene his own agenda. If Middle America had a greater predilection for hard news and reasoned presentation, as offered for example on public radio and TV, it seems to me that commercial news sources would be only too happy to oblige them.