White House Correspondents JIM ACOSTA, CHRIS JANSING, MIKE VIQUEIRA, JULIET EILPERIN, CHRISTI PARSONS & ED HENRY
TRAVEL RICHARD BRANSON’S DREAMLINER AND JAMES MADISON’S MONTPELIER
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FASHION SEQUINS, FRINGE AND LACE
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SPORTS REDSKINS RYAN KERRIGAN & DARREL YOUNG
THE 2015 A-LIST WASHINGTON’S MOST INVITED GUESTS
J I M AC O STA , C N N
CHRIS JANSING, NBC
MIKE VIQUEIRA, AL JAZEERA AMERICA
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SIX WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENTS GO ON THE RECORD ABOUT THEIR ACCESS TO PRESIDENT OBAMA, NEW MEDIA COMPETITION AND THEIR ANNUAL DINNER BY VIRGINIA COYNE | PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY POWELL
C H R I ST I PA R S O N S , LOS A N G E L E S T I M E S
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E D H E N R Y, F O X N E W S C H A N N E L
J U L I E T E I L P E R I N , WA S H I N G T O N P O S T WA S H I N G T O N L I F E
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MAKEUP: DIANA KIM | HAIR: NEVEN RADOVIC OF IAN MCCABE STUDIO P H O T O G R A P H E D AT T H E H AY A D A M S H O T E L , T O P O F T H E H AY
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athering a group of White House correspondents for breakfast together is no small feat. Given the long days (and nights) they spend toiling in the West Wing and traveling with the leader of the free world, our morning meeting atop The Hay-Adams Hotel, where the White House would remain in their line of sight, took weeks to coordinate. But the conversation with these six seasonded reporters was worth the wait. They spoke openly on everything from their access to the Oval Office to the feeding frenzy surrounding the annual White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner. Our coffee-fueled talk included CNN’s Jim Acosta; the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin; Fox News Channel’s Ed Henry, NBC’s Chris Jansing; Al Jazeera America’s first-ever White House correspondent, Mike Viqueira; and Christi Parsons, president of the WHCA and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune. It was Parsons who brought the discussion to an end by running off to a meeting to determine table assignments for the WHCA dinner on April 25. >> Washington Life: This is a rare event — all
of you having a meal together. With such busy schedules, when do you have time to eat ? Ed Henry: Because I know it’s going to be so crazy there every day, I have a ritual to get food and then walk in. Nine times out of 10, if you leave [the White House], something happens and then you get locked out. Chris Jansing: I do not leave the grounds and that’s really sort of the rule. You don’t know when something’s going to happen. And isn’t it true that on that morning that you say ‘today I’m going to get caught up on my expenses and answer my emails’ something completely unexpected happens? That’s the great part of the White House – when something big happens there’s this adrenaline rush and you feel like you’re in the epicenter of the world. Juliet Eilperin: There are these moments that happen and sometimes it’s an actual news event, something that’s breaking overseas, sometimes it’s the President talking to the press, when you do feel like history is being made. Getting a front
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Breakfast with a view: correpondents answer questions from senior editor Virginia Coyne (center) at the Hay-Adams Hotel’s Top of the Hay overlooking the White House and Washington Monument.
seat to that is pretty great. How much of a White House press conference is orchestrated? Who gets called on and do you know ahead of time if the President will take your question? Christi Parsons: We don’t want it to be orchestrated in any way and I don’t think it is. I’ve been called on before and not known that it was coming. Sometimes you can read the body language so you do know, they seem to be doing newspapers today or it kind of feels like a TV day. Chris Jansing: Or International Women’s Day, when they called on all women. Christi Parsons: I didn’t even realize that was happening until it was over and everybody started tweeting it. Juliet Eilperin: Same with me and I was one of the people who was called on. I just noticed they weren’t calling on TV people. Mike Viqueira: Juliet hates TV! (laughter) Juliet, you did mention to me before breakfast that you feel the television people are called on more often during those live press conferences, correct? Juliet Eilperin: I think it’s more important for
them and for their viewers, and the White House recognizes it, and I also think there’s a level of [monetary] investment that the networks put into covering the White House that is then in turn recognized by the White House. Mike Viqueira: If they wanted to be equitable in that respect then they wouldn’t be doing the
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woman with Fruit Loops in the bathtub kind of thing [referring to YouTube vlogger GloZell, who recently interviewed the President]. I think those sort of equities and those sort of considerations are shifting a great deal when they try to decide who they’re going to have interview him, when, what venue, what issue. Jim Acosta: Not to be a Debbie Downer at this breakfast, but one of the issues that we run into is that we’re pressing them for more access, more press conferences.They do have all of these new outlets that they can turn to — YouTube, Vice, BuzzFeed — and because there’s this explosion of newer media out there, it creates fewer and fewer opportunities for the traditional White House press corps to ask questions.Whenever we raise this issue to people at the White House, the White House and the new media world say ‘oh, you guys are old media, you guys are dinosaurs, you’re dying.’ But I think there is this tug-of-war going on and quite frankly, I would like to see more orchestrating of press conferences because we need to have more of them. When you see the President giving access and interviews to YouTube video bloggers who have never covered the White House, how does that make you feel? Christi Parsons: I actually don’t have an
objection to that because I feel more questions from more diverse organizations is good. However, I do think that the independent press at the White House is not something the White House should ever try to go around because
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special feature | White House Correspondents
CNN’s Jim Acosta, Al Jazeera America’s Mike Viqueira and NBC’s Chris Jansing.
we are the people who are there all the time. This group of people knows more about the President than almost any random selection of community journalists or bloggers.They bring a valuable perspective. There’s really nothing that compares to the people who are at the White House every day, who devote themselves to knowing about the President, understand how the White House works and can ask the most pressing, cutting questions. Jim Acosta: My concern is not so much that new media is getting invited to talk to the President. My concern is that the White House tries to use this tug of war, this push and pull between old and new media to their advantage and that there may be opportunities where they think it’s best to bring in a new media outlet versus talking to us or answering our questions at a press conference. I just don’t like that because it yields more power over the information coming out of this place to them, and in this world where there is this big explosion of new media — they have the furniture, they control all of the access and they can make it even more difficult. Mike Viqueira: At the outset of the Obama administration, they started releasing things through tweet and certain people in the press room were like ‘this is beneath the office.You’re going to release things by Twitter?’ Jim Acosta: Almost as profound as the fact that President Obama is the first African American president is the fact that he’s the first social media president and it has totally changed the game. WL: Social media is now part of your job. How
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has that changed your reporting? Chris Jansing: For those of us who are here,
it’s an adjustment, because this is a full-time job. Doing what you do and getting it on the air, or writing what you write for your news outlet, is completely all-consuming. We all pride ourselves on being able to make things more understandable in a very smart and comprehensive way, and suddenly you’re trying to do that on Twitter and it’s an adjustment.You want to do justice to something that could be really significant and you don’t necessarily have the depth, the opportunity to do that when you’re doing it on social media. On the other hand, it’s an opportunity to give people a chance to be engaged every day, multiple times a day, in a way they never would have before. Christi Parsons: But if you’re going to do that sort of thing, you can’t let your journalistic day get eaten up by those little bites. As a group, we push for opportunities to ask the President questions in the Oval Office.We are pushing for press conference no less than once every six weeks.We are pushing for a chance to ask him questions multiple times each week. Ed Henry: The President started doing that a little bit more recently and I think that’s part of Christi’s hard work and everybody on the board of the White House Correspondents’ Association. WL: Do you feel like this president has given you more or less access than previous presidents? Ed Henry: This ends up becoming political and subjective. I hear people now say Obama is so much less transparent or accessible than
Bush, but if you look at the statistics, while Bush took more questions on a daily basis, this president has taken more questions in interviews and other settings. My bottom line is that they have the freedom to take questions however they like, whatever tools of social media and whatnot, but I think the president sort of lifted the standard by starting things out saying ‘I’m going to have the most transparent administration ever’ and there have been some pretty clear-cut examples, the Clinton email situation recently, suggesting that isn’t true. Jim Acosta: People like Anne Compton, the long-time ABC News correspondent, or Susan Page of USA Today are saying this is the least transparent president that they’ve covered in a generation. Barack Obama came into office saying his would be the most open and transparent administration that we’ve ever had, yet you have two living institutions here in Washington saying that’s not the case. I agree, I think Christi and the Correspondents’ Association have done an incredible job of opening up access recently. The president has seen a need to do more of that since the midterms, but I always feel like it doesn’t hurt to give them a little nudge, a little reminder every now and then that they could do more. Chris jansing: Statistics only tell part of the story, right? There’s an enormous difference between the number of questions someone takes and the number of times they make themselves available and whether or not they’re willing to make news. chrsti Parsons: Here’s where we are as a group: the press should have access to the president on a regular basis to ask him questions and to see him at work and to cross- examine him. And in specific terms it looks like this — we talk to him this often, he never does X event without taking Y questions from the press corps. I also want to make this point because you are doing this around the time of the White House Correspondents’ dinner:This is our annual company dinner. This is when we get together as a group and forge the bonds of our organization. The dinner is important for journalistic reasons. It coalesces us. It’s a time when we all get together about what we do, not just at the dinner itself but in the run-up to the dinner. So, when people buy tickets or in other ways show their support, they are supporting an association that spends all
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of their time working to open the doors of that building over there. Has the dinner become too much of a spectacle, more about the celebrities in attendance than the correspondents and scholarships as some critics are saying, including Patrick Gavin in his new documentary “Nerd Prom”? Christi Parsons: Yes. The celebrities and the
broadcast of [the dinner] and all of that have contributed to the spectacle a little bit, but I feel better about that than it being behind closed doors. ... This is about as plain and open as you can get.You get to see who we’re having dinner with and how we do it. The celebrities are advocates who come to push their agenda. There’s a good reason that the motion picture industry goes to such great lengths to make sure they are there. Mike Viqueira: Should we be a part of that? Christi Parsons: Look, I don’t invite celebrities to sit at my table. I invite newsmakers because to me this is a dinner where reporters and newsmakers sit down and have conversations, informal conversations, in which we learn things. Juliet Eilperin: And that’s a better use of our time.The Post has that policy.We invite Cabinet members and senior officials and it is an opportunity where we can talk about things and get story ideas. Mike Viqueira: But the public doesn’t see that. They see Sean Penn walking with his wife on the red carpet. Let’s face it, there’s a whole entrance reserved for celebrities to walk which literally has a red carpet! I mean, for all the laudable goals that the dinner achieves, I find that to be a little bit embarrassing. It turns into this sort of orgy of self-reverance. As a journalist, I train myself not to be impressed by famous people. I found my threshold last year when Robert DeNiro was there and I was a little bit in awe of him as an Italian American. Christi Parsons:I am not impressed by people who bring Miley Cyrus.That is not going to win you extra tables, or a table at all.When people call you and say ‘oh my God, you’ve got to give me a table because I’ve got XYZ’ that’s an argument against giving those people seats. Mike Viqueira: I do think the celebrity issue has gotten out of hand. Christi Parsons: I agree with you, but I also want to say that it’s supposed to be fun. That’s
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Fox New Channel’s Ed Henry, the Washington Post’s Juilet Eilperin and WHCA President Christi Parsons discuss the upcoming correpondents’ dinner.
what makes people want to come — because they want to meet DeNiro. They also want to meet Madeline Albright and they want to see the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and those people probably get as many selfies from admiring correspondents as the celebrities. The celebrities do create a certain buzz that helps us attract people. Ultimately that goes back to what I was saying before about our group and our weight at the White House. I don’t mean to be dismissive of the celebrities because most of those who come are people who care about politics and government and when they come they are lending their support to an organization with really noble goals. Jim Acosta: And sometimes they can create a moment. I remember the 2011 correspondents’ dinner when Donald Trump was there, Obama had just put out the long form birth certificate and he just went after Donald Trump in his remarks. When the camera focused on Trump it was just priceless because the president was sort of getting his revenge. So, sometimes those dinners can be stories in themselves. Are there other jokes or remarks that made news? Juliet Eilperin: When Obama was declared
the first nerd president, that’s something that frankly, I’ve used in a story because it does accurately describe him. Ed Henry: Then there was the one where he said ‘people say I should reach out to Congress more, I should have dinner with Mitch McConnell – you have dinner with Mitch McConnell!’
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and he got a pretty good laugh from Republicans in the room. Jim Acosta: And then that became a story. Juliet Eilperin: Obviously the rule of thumb for any politician who’s giving one of these talks is make fun of yourself .That is the way you end up both being funny and not alienating your audience. Ed Henry: It’s not like everyone’s getting a chance to hang out with the President that night, and if your table has the Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense, I’m not pretending that we’re sitting there talking about major national policy the whole dinner, but getting to sit next to Jeh Johnson, the Homeland Security Secretary, and thus having a better sense of who he is so that if, God forbid, you are covering a terror attack in six months, you’ll see he’s more of a multidimensional person. Our coverage can get single dimensional too, often when we don’t know the people we cover. Chris Jansing: Just because you’re sitting next to somebody at dinner doesn’t mean that you’re putting your arm around them and suddenly we’re best friends. It means we’re coming to an understanding about who we both are and hopefully coming to a point of mutual respect that helps you both do your jobs better. Christi Parsons:That is a really important thing for my readers and their viewers and radio listeners, for the people that represent you on that beat, to be having these kinds of conversations.That’s what we mean when we talk about press access. We mean people, reporters, asking vigorous questions.
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