How Did White House Press Briefings Go From Daily to Done?

Press briefings have been a regular event at the White House since the late 1800s, so why has the Trump administration cancelled them? Learn about the history behind the practice (and what's replaced them) in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain
Stuff Lauren vogelbam here. In January, best selling novelists Stephen
King and Don Winslow took to Twitter to make a
surprising pledge. They offered to donate two hundred thousand dollars
to charity if Stephanie Grisham, the Press secretary for President

(00:22):
Donald Trump, agreed to take questions from the full White
House Press Corps for one hour in the White House's
press briefing room. The offer reportedly was rejected by Grisham, who,
since taking the job in June of nine, has yet
to hold even one formal White House press briefing. Her views,
expressed in an interview with the Sinclair Broadcast Group, is

(00:42):
that the briefings are unnecessary because reporters get opportunities to
put questions to Trump himself, sometimes over the roar of
the presidential helicopter on the White House lawn. For the
time being, at least, the Trump administration has abandoned what
had been an important part of White House Press Corps
routine dating back to the late eighteen hundreds, before the
official position of White House Press secretary even existed. That's

(01:05):
when President William McKinley set up a workspace in the
White House for reporters and sent his first personal secretary,
John Addison Porter, to give the correspondence what the White
House Historical Association notes were more or less regular briefings.
The White House press briefing gradually evolved into a formal event.
From the time of President Herbert Hoover in the late
nineteen twenties and early thirties to Lyndon Johnson's tenure in

(01:28):
the mid to late sixties, white House press secretaries held
twice a day briefing sessions in their own offices. According
to Martha joint Kumar's book Managing the President's Message, the
White House Communications Operation, Richard Nixon, though no fan of
the press, still thought the briefings were important enough that
he had a swimming pool torn out so that he
could convert the space into a meeting room for briefings.

(01:50):
That area is now known as the James Brady Press
Briefing Room, in honor of President Ronald Reagan's press secretary,
who was seriously wounded during the attempt on Reagan's life.
During Bill Clinton's time in the White House in the
nineteen nineties, Press Secretary Mike McCurry decided to allow the
daily press briefings to be televised. That practice continued until
the Trump White House began barring cameras from briefings in

(02:12):
twenty seventeen, before discontinuing them altogether. We spoke via email
with FORMERCY and N White House correspondent Dan Lothian, who
spent five years covering the Bush and Obama administrations. He said,
I think the briefings were useful for a number of reasons.
First of all, it was an opportunity to get the
White House response or thinking on an issue on camera

(02:33):
rather than a written statement. It allowed us to gang
up on them around a question they might have been
trying to avoid, showing them dodge and answer is sometimes.
The news briefings also put statements on the record for
later comparison. Finally, every now and then there would be
breaking news, and as happened after a Summa bin Lauden
was caught lots of great details, even if some turned

(02:54):
out not to be true. Lothian, who went on to
found Little Park Media and to become a visiting caller
at the School of Journalism at Northeastern University, recalls that
the format for the briefings was fairly constant. He said
there was a certain order to who got called on.
Briefings always started with the associated press and ended with
a thank you from the Associated Press. Once in a

(03:16):
while the Press secretary wouldn't mix it up a bit,
but it usually happened around the same time each day,
and questions from the first two rows came in order.
We also spoke by email with Tom Jones, a senior
media writer for the Pointer Institute, a journalism education organization.
He said, while it's true that the president and his
representatives often make themselves available in informal settings such as

(03:38):
the White House lawn, it's not the same as press briefings.
The format of shouting out questions under the sound of
a whirling helicopter is not conducive to asking complicated policy
questions nor pertinent follow up questions. The frenzied free for
all of these. Much too brief informal interviews make it
much harder to get into the topics that require nuance
and specifics. It's so much easy for the president to

(04:00):
brush aside or ignore questions he doesn't like when he's
walking along the White House grounds, when he or one
of his representatives are standing behind a podium in a
controlled setting, they must face the questions that require long,
substantive answers, as opposed to the one or two short
sentences that suffice in those informal settings. That view, essentially
is shared by a group of thirteen former White House

(04:22):
press secretaries and foreign service and military officials who published
an opinion piece on CNN's website in January calling for
Trump to restore the regular briefings. In their view, having
to prepare for briefings helps the government to run better,
they wrote. The sharing of information known as official guidance,
among government officials and agencies helps ensure that an administration

(04:44):
speaks with one voice, telling one story, however compelling it
might be. Lothian also sees the apparent end of the
briefings as unfortunate. He said, it's a valid criticism that
some reporters use briefings to show boat. However, I think
when covering the White House, briefings are an important function
that allow the public and reporters to maintain daily connections.

(05:06):
Sometimes it's routine information, other times an odd question from
the back of the room can turn into the story
of the day. Even so, Lothian says journalists who cover
the administration will find a way to get stories. He
said this new normal might be unfortunate, but not paralyzing.
Reporters are in the business of getting information, whether it
comes from the mouth of a spokesperson or from sources

(05:28):
all across the Beltway. Today's episode was written by Patrick J.
Tiger and produced by Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more on
this and lots of other informational topics, visit our home planet,
how stuff Works dot com, and for more podcasts for
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(05:50):
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.