By His Deeds Shall Ye Know Him

Former Clinton press secretary Mike McCurry said White House correspondents "are really good journalists, probably the best on the face of the planet." But the White House briefing room is just not the place to be if you're looking for news," he said.

Slate's John Dickerson, formerly of Time, called the briefings "useless" and said that to report on the White House, "you have to go around it."

But editors love tidbits so much that White House reporters are loath to tick off the people who dole them out, Dickerson said. Ask the wrong question at a press conference and top advisers stop returning your phone calls, he said.

Rising from the audience, Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, scolded the White House press corps for its lack of staying power. As an example, he cited Bush's recent admission that U.S. troops would still be in Iraq in 2009. That should not just have been a one-day story, Wyden argued.

Huffington explained that "the media are generally suffering from attention deficit disorder" -- while by contrast bloggers like her, "can be persistent."

And in his remarks before the panel, Senator Chris Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, suggested that perhaps a better topic for the whole panel would have been: "Are White House correspondents covering a real president?"

Dissecting McClellan

Media critic Michael Wolff eviscerates McClellan -- "something of a knucklehead Socrates" -- in this month's Vanity Fair.

"[T]he briefing has become the living, inarticulate, comically absurd voice of the White House. Under McClellan the briefing is not only the source of news but news itself: McClellan's performance, its degree of ham-handedness, echoed and refracted in a thousand blogs, is a central political event. . . .

"Putting someone as strikingly out of his depth as McClellan into this job (and keeping him there) could well be part of this administration's contempt for the press."

While he's at it, Wolff also critiques the press corps. "[A]mong the overrated jobs in American journalism is being a daily assignment reporter covering the White House. You are, in essence, a transcriber. The White House dishes out relative baloney and you serve it. So if you're the press secretary, your job is to make the baloney palatable. You have to help provide press people with the wherewithal to maintain the belief that they are doing something more than writing up your spin -- you have to go the extra lingua-mile to make the spin seem plausible, clever, elegant, seductive, uplifting even. It is not just the stubbornness of McClellan's baloney but the inartfulness that makes everybody nuts. He offers nobody any cover. . . .

"His inability to finesse the administration line, to tickle its logic, to prettify it, to seem smart about it in the least -- and with virtually every one of his prevaricating and dissembling and truth-avoiding utterances becoming the morsels of the daily blog diet -- means the media has to struggle even more to justify how it ever believed these numskulls."

Wolff gets a rare sit-down interview with McClellan. "But there remains the same intractable problem: he's as inexpressive one-on-one as he is in the briefing room."