(As I finish that sentence, Brian Williams delivers a quote that I think pricelessly sums up my answer: "What happens when the President wants a burger?" posits Brian Williams. He pauses. "And it's halfway across town." Oye vey.)
I would guess I'm not the only person looking at this special through journalistic eyes at this media event (playing out both on air and online) with a healthy degree of skepticism. On one hand, I do see the news value in breaking into the heavily-guarded fortress whose walls the media works so desperately to try and breech 24/7/365. NBC has done this before — their Inside the White House specials, in one form or another, go back to the Kennedy administration. And Newsweek's inside accounts of the 2008 presidential campaign — for which reporters promised strict confidentiality and gave up their rights to work with their newsrooms during the campaign — was hailed as a triumph of election journalism that so often gets mired in tracking of polls and campaign movements.
("What do you think of the depictions of you — Saturday Night Live [shameless plug!] and Fred Armisen?" asks Williams. Again, oye. I know I'm cherrypicking, but the timing of these bytes as I write this is just perfect.)
But the skeptic in me watches the special and sees a television production orchestrated by MTV, not a news special executed by journalists. Unlike the Newsweek stories, which essentially rehashed previous stories with high news value from a new, unique perspective, there is no newsworthy story to rehash here.
Example: the Robert Gibbs segment, demonstrating how his power as the mouthpiece of the White House doesn't nearly measure up to the President's power to sway the media conversation — a cool perspective, without a doubt. But Obama wasn't announcing his pick for a Vice Presidential candidate (as was detailed in the Newsweek accounts) — he wasn't even announcing his pick for Supreme Court Justice. The Obama administration simply prepared a response to criticism of some comments made by his nominee, Sonia Sotomayor. The segment suggested Obama's voice was much more persuasive in the media conversation than were senior Obama advisor David Axelrod's and Gibbs' voices.
The fact that the president has strong sway over the national dialogue is not news. Period. And we don't need news division cameras — or journalists (like Brian Williams) to prove that point!
What I find praiseworthy about the NBC News team's visit (through what I've seen thus far) is that at least they did have the good sense to ask time-sensitive questions about the Sotomayor nomination (which they used on Nightly News the night they were said). Brian Williams also sat down for a formal interview with the president and promises they discussed a broad range of hard-hitting questions — that's coming up on tomorrow's episode.
But it feels like access to the White House, even for a few days, may not be enough to gather enough news to be considered newsworthy. Perhaps if cameras had been allowed to roll in high-level meetings, things might be different. Instead, the lasting visual in my head is of chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel waving bye-bye as an ornate wooden door closes in my face.
The location of a story or the players alone do not make a story newsworthy — and what newsworthy profiling of the players involved was nothing new in-and-of itself (We all know Rahm Emmanuel was fast-tracked for something other than chief-of-staff in the White House and that he swears a lot — it's been widely reported on). We as journalists need to do a better job of understanding the degree to which we play into the calculus of politics. We may have done these types of profiles since the Kennedy years, but that does not mean we cannot exercise modern news judgment on situations like this. We cannot let our guard down when we're allowed access into El Dorado, even if there is no news to cover there.
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