REPORTING
The Greening of the White House
For viewers and readers who associate White House reporting with old pros like Sam Donaldson and the legendary Helen Thomas, the presence of so many twenty-somethings these days may be a bit jarring. While the White House press corps has yet to be overrun by them, there are an increasing number of correspondents who were not born when the Watergate break-in occurred.
The increase in twenty- and thirty-somethings at the White House is “definitely a trend,” says Jeff Zeleny, a twenty-eight-year-old national political correspondent for the Chicago Tribune. Nobody keeps exact figures, but Rachael Sunbarger, press assistant to the White House press secretary, estimates that up to thirty members of the presidential press corps — a group of about 100 regulars — are under thirty. Joe Lockhart, a press secretary during the Clinton administration, says he was very surprised by how many senior White House reporters were succeeded by younger reporters just during his two years on the job.
Steve Holland, forty-six, president of the White House Correspondents Association (and a White House reporter for Reuters), is not particularly surprised by the trend. “The White House is a young person’s beat,” he says. “The hours are long, the travel is grueling.” Other factors include money — twenty-somethings come cheaper than seasoned forty-year-olds — and a declining appeal (at least until September 11) of the White House beat to many older correspondents. “Many of the elder statesmen are gone because it’s not considered the be-all and end-all journalism assignment,” says Mark Knoller, a veteran White House correspondent for CBS News. “To a great extent,” Holland says, “the White House is a very scripted place, and, in fact, is a bore and a grind to some of the most experienced reporters in town.”
But should reporters be learning the ropes at the White House level? Helen Thomas, who was forty when she started covering the White House for UPI in 1961, has some trepidation about the “quantum leap” in the number of less experienced reporters covering the White House. “I believe that a reporter needs some experience and seasoning, some sophistication about how the system works,” she says. “The greening of the young is fine, but somewhere else.”
Asked what advice she’d give to today’s young White House reporters, Thomas, now a Washington columnist for Hearst Newspapers, says, “First, to know it is a privilege to be there; to cover history in the making, every day, and to realize you can question a president. Many Americans would die for that privilege.” Several young White House reporters interviewed for this article seemed to need no such reminder, particularly in the wake of September 11, which gave them a crash course in the weight of the beat. David L. Greene, twenty-five, of the Baltimore Sun, says that after the terrorist attack, “It became clear that my job for the foreseeable future was to be on Bush every day, every minute. He was now, for all intents and purposes, a wartime leader, and everything he did had elevated importance.” At The Boston Globe’s Washington bureau, Anne Kornblut, who turned twenty-nine in February, feels that “there’s a certain vigor here now that was lacking before.” Before the terrorist attacks, she thought that “Washington as a whole could sometimes feel irrelevant.” But afterward, “We all had truly burning questions to ask.” Three weeks after the attacks, Katy Textor, twenty-seven, was transferred from her post with ABC’s Peter Jennings Reports in New York to join the network’s White House bureau as a producer and off-air reporter. “If I miss something,” she says, “it matters more now.”
Not every twenty-something White House reporter wanted to stick around after the attacks. The UPI’s number two White House correspondent, Mark Kukis, twenty-eight, quit in early October and flew to Islamabad, where he set up shop as a free lance. Two months later, shortly after the appearance of two of his war-related articles in Salon, Kukis expressed no regrets. “The White House was my first beat, and despite all its extraordinary aspects, I think it’s difficult to develop as a journalist just covering a president,” he said. “I felt that I needed to do some reporting in the so-called real world.”
Greene of the Sun finds the job plenty real — but also not as glamorous as some might think. “Truth be told, the hours are lousy; the briefing room at the White House is chaotic and surprisingly quite a mess; the vending machine coffee is barely tolerable; the trips are tiring,” he said in an e-mail interview. “For the beginning of the U.S.-Russian summit, our charter arrived in Waco around 1 a.m., and we deplaned, having enjoyed the movie, America’s Sweethearts, and an endless supply of beef jerky. The bad hours have been known to break up marriages.
“But for me, and for most of my colleagues, these experiences
are simply part of a job we love,” Greene writes. “From
what I hear from past correspondents, the job was never empirically
glamorous. It took someone special to enjoy it — and apparently,
someone who likes beef jerky.”
Enjoy this piece? Consider a CJR trial subscription.
