Former White House Press Officers Speak At the IOP

Three former White House spokespersons recounted their experiences at the center of the media frenzy surrounding presidents and their families at the Institute of Politics last night.

In a discussion moderated by Harvard Kennedy School Professor David R. Gergen, the three spokespersons—whose tenures in the White House ranged from the beginning of the Clinton administration to this August—agreed that the Internet fundamentally changed the news cycle.

Dee Dee Myers, former President Bill Clinton’s press secretary from 1993 to 1994, lamented the end of the news cycle with the rise of the Internet and, along with it, the constant chatter of the blogosphere.

“When the daily papers went to bed the news cycle would end,” she said, describing her time managing media relations for the Oval Office. “Now, there is no news cycle...It is completely trivializing. It’s ADD.”

But Ari Fleischer, who worked for former President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2003, disagreed with Myers about the negative impact of technological advancements. Even though “the technology moved at light speed,” Fleischer said, the president could still influence Congress to pass his legislative priorities.

The three press officers also discussed dealing with immediate media concerns as compared to promoting a press strategy with a longer time horizon, and various administrations’ approaches to this balance.

Camille Johnston, Michelle Obama’s Director of Communications from 2009 to this August, explained the distinction between the long term and the short term in Obama’s White House and described them as “two very separate processes” discussed in different meetings.

“The long term planning is a luxury on the West Wing side of things. It is done on an entirely separate track,” she said. “There’s so much going on, you can only have an impact on certain things.”

Myers said she admired the Obama campaign’s willingness to think about the longer-term goals, sometimes at the expense of winning the daily news cycle—unlike the Clinton administration’s approach.

“I think in the Clinton White House, we got in to too much of trying to win the news cycle at the expense of longer-term goals,” Myers said.

But the demands of the shortened news cycle and the need to “put out fires,” as Fleischer described the daily crisis management process, made it near-impossible for the press secretary to think about long-term concerns—which fell instead under the purview of the communications director and other top aides.

“As press secretary, my definition of long term was getting through today,” Fleischer said.

—Staff writer Monika L.S. Robbins can be reached at mrobbins@college.harvard.edu.