White House news

Mondo Times editors    Boulder Colorado USA

Posted at 2:34pm on Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

A look at the relations between the Obama White House and the press, written by Michael Wolff in the July 2009 issue of Vanity Fair magazine:

"The Obamas may have the smartest, most finely calibrated press operation in White House history, parceling out scoops (The New York Times), partisan talking points (the Huffington Post), and First Family tidbits (the celebrity mags) to a desperate media. Just don’t ask them to admit it.

Bill Burton is the baby-faced political op with a little too much junk food under his belt—and, at 31, with one of the political world’s longest résumés in media relations—who runs the pressroom at the White House. He’s got possibly the littlest office in the West Wing, but it’s where you want your West Wing office to be, guarding somebody more important than you.

Burton is guarding his boss, the president’s press secretary, Robert Gibbs—who guards the president—from me. The Obama presidency is striving to be the most open and available in modern history, hence—and I am here on the 98th day—its first 100 days of remarkable staging, including dogs, wife, children, mother-in-law, bailouts, and handshakes and bows with dubious world leaders. But what it doesn’t want to be open about is the staging itself. One of its least favorite subjects is media. As much as the Obama-ites don’t want to be as defensive and recalcitrant as the Bushes were when it came to the press, having methodically reviewed all lessons from recent administrations, they also don’t want to seem as clever, pleased with themselves, and publicity-crazed as the Clintons, who talked endlessly of media strategies—precisely because they are much more clever and publicity-crazed."

The full story:
www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2009/07/wolff200907

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 12:58pm on Thursday, May 7th, 2009

The Obama administration is unlikely to help the ailing newspaper industry, Agence France Presse reported on May 4, 2009:

"The White House on Monday expressed "concern" and "sadness" over the state of the ailing US newspaper industry, but made clear that a government bailout was not in the cards.

"I don't know what, in all honesty, government can do about it," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. "That might be a bit of a tricky area to get into given the differing roles."

Eric Kallgren    Boulder, Colorado USA

Posted at 10:32pm on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009

On January 20, 2009, the day Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States, Slate gave a tour of the new Whitehouse.gov:

"When I logged on to the White House Web site about an hour before the inauguration, George W. Bush was already gone. He'd been replaced by an error message that popped up while, I imagine, the Young Turks on Obama's Web team flipped over the site. I kept hitting refresh, and just after noon, before the new president even took the oath, Barack Obama popped up online. The new White House Web site leads with a smiling photo and the headline, "Change Has Come to America." Click the photo and you're taken to the site's leading element—the White House Blog.

I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise that Obama, who gained so much from online social networks during the campaign, is greeting the Internet with a blog post. Still, it's a dramatic transition from the last White House site—indeed, from every White House site ever, not to mention most government sites—which took a formal, we'll-tell-you-what's-going-on tone on its front page. At its close, the Bush site was mainly a mess of links to press releases, speeches, and propaganda documents. (One of its leading sections was titled "Setting the Record Straight.")"