What a delicious scenario: Jay Carney admitting that before he takes the podium, the assembled group of White House correspondents have already given him their questions in advance.
The briefings are just a sham! Collusion at 1600 Pennsylvania! The lapdog press corps, finally exposed!
But even as this tale caught fire across the web, the only thing it proved is that a local CBS reporter mangled the facts.
Here's how it played out: President Obama gave an interview to Catherine Anaya, an anchor at KPHO in Phoenix. She went on the air to provide some color, and talked about a private chat with the president's press secretary:
'This was off the record, so we were able to ask him all about some of the preparation he does on a regular basis for talking to the press.'
Ding! Ding! Ding! Does Anaya know that 'off the record' means you're not allowed to quote the person -- indeed, that you're not supposed to use the information unless you can confirm it elsewhere? Apparently not. Memo to Anaya: Journalists have gone to jail for refusing to betray sources who gave them information off the record.
Anaya told viewers that Carney, in describing his daily preparation, 'also mentioned that a lot of times, unless it's something breaking, the questions that the reporters actually ask -- the correspondents -- they are provided to him in advance. So then he knows what he's going to be answering and sometimes those correspondents and reporters also have those answers printed in front of them, because of course it helps when they're producing their reports for later on. So that was very interesting.'
Interesting? It would indeed be a bombshell -- if true.
( The video of Anaya, above, was pulled from YouTube late Thursday supposedly for 'copyright' reasons.)
Carney brushed it off in an email to me: 'Briefings would be a lot easier if this were true! Rest assured, it is not.'
The Weekly Standard, among other websites, picked it up without a trace of skepticism. Drudge gave it a screaming headline: 'REPORTERS REHEARSE QUESTIONS WITH WHITE HOUSE PRESS SEC.'
And Twitter exploded, with some people declaring things like 'journalism is dead.'
CNN's Jake Tapper addressed the flap, tweeting: 'Not from me, this rings false. this sounds like a misunderstanding.' And: 'So you think I submitted questions to Jay Carney ahead of time? And then he gave those answers memorably captured on YouTube?'
Perhaps, I thought, Carney had said that from talking to reporters all day he can anticipate the questions asked at the briefing, which is of course his job. On some occasions, reporters might send word that they want to ask detailed questions about a subject so the press secretary can't duck by saying he hasn't looked into the subject. But that is hardly routine.
KPHO posted a rather convoluted statement on Thursday from Anaya. She said she didn't use any off-the-record information from Carney. In fact, he never told her anything about getting journalists' questions in advance: 'I regret giving anyone the impression that it was from [the] conversation I had with Mr. Carney.'
Instead, said Anaya, she wanted to attend the briefing and was asked to provide her question -- which was so local that she saved it for the Obama interview. 'My mistake was to lump that experience with my coffee meeting reference, inadvertently giving Mr. Carney credit for that when in fact it did not come from him.'
A pretty big mistake. I asked a White House spokesman if Anaya was in fact asked for her question in advance. He noted that the station had abruptly pulled her statement off its website. A producer at KPHO told Townhall.com that the station had posted the wrong statement.
I'm sorry, this is amateur hour.
We are waiting to see if the station has another statement now that the previous one has been declared, to use the old Watergate term, inoperative.
Bottom line: No self-respecting White House reporter wants to tip his hand in advance, even if the questions are predictable. And if Carney had the info beforehand, his answers would probably be better -- or at least funnier.
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Howard Kurtz is a Fox News analyst and the host of 'MediaBuzz' (Sundays 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET). He is the author of five books and is based in Washington.
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, March 20, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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