Building A Bridge To The Media President Clinton Will Be Making A Concerted Effort In His Second Term To Get Along Better With The Media

It is tough to say when the bottom came, but White House aides point to a warm September morning on the campaign trail in Fresno, Calif., when a reporter for National Public Radio asked at a briefing if President Clinton was carrying a sexually transmitted disease.

Journalists are more likely to point to Nov. 6, the day after the election, when reporters arriving at Andrews Air Force Base were ordered by security to remain on their parked charter plane for well over an hour when they should have been filing their stories while Clinton lingered nearby on Air Force One, celebrating his victory with family and friends.

With these symbolic incidents in mind, Clinton and his senior strategists are beginning the second term with a concerted campaign to rehabilitate his relationship with the news media, which some analysts said has deteriorated to a level not seen in the White House in more than 20 years.

“Clinton probably has the most distrustful view of the American press since Nixon,” said Tom Rosenstiel, an executive with the Pew Center for Civic Journalism in Washington and a former media critic for the Los Angeles Times. “He and the first lady, from all accounts, public and private, have more than a healthy distrust.” They have “a deep antipathy for the press.”

Ken Auletta, a media columnist for the New Yorker, said: “There is a feeling among reporters that the truth and Clinton don’t often go together. Reporters have a feeling he is a man without conviction.”

The relationship became so strained in the past year that Clinton held just two formal lengthy press conferences in the 10 months leading up to the election. Of those, one was held in Lyon, France, during a summit there, and the other was conducted jointly in the White House with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Reporters often joked that they could cover Clinton for weeks at a time without ever coming within range of actually catching his eye. At one point, a New York Times White House correspondent, Alison Mitchell, surprised press secretary Michael McCurry by telling him, after she had been on the beat for more than six months, that she had yet to meet the man she was covering.

Clinton has had two lengthy press conferences since his reelection, and has publicly promised another one soon. In early December, he invited half a dozen newly assigned White House reporters to his private residence for a 90 minute off-the-record discussion over coffee and dessert.

Less formally, he now appears in the back of Air Force One, where reporters sit, on most presidential flights. He played a practical joke on the wife of a wire service reporter by calling her from his plane.

“The bottom line is, all we want is a fair shake, that’s all,” said McCurry, chief architect of the press strategy. “And it is hard to get a fair shake when everything is so shrouded in mystery around here. That’s the way I think reporters feel about it because they can’t reach out and touch the person that they’re covering and really get a sense of what’s going on. It’s all done behind this curtain all the time.

“All we’re trying to do is make the story more transparent to the reporter, make him more accessible so people understand what his thinking is, and hopefully generate more accurate reporting,” McCurry said. “This is basically just common sense.”

The strained relationship is surprising because Clinton, aides and reporters said, can think on his feet, has command of the language, an insatiable appetite for personal friendships and the drive to court adversaries.

“He is the most charming man I have ever met,” said Brit Hume, a correspondent for ABC News. “He is a man it is possible not to respect or admire, but it is impossible not to like him. He has a friendly, affable good-humored side that he displays to people. The fact is, though, he has given up on the press.”

At stake in the relationship is nothing short of the president’s national popularity, according to analysts. Good relations with the news media can ultimately mean higher public opinion ratings, which can provide Clinton more sway in pushing his agenda in Congress and greater fortitude fending off accusations ranging from Whitewater to Asian money laundering.

The strategy is being played out at an awkward time for the administration, given the rash of revelations on Clinton’s courtship of Asian contributors and his use of the White House to reward high-rolling donors.

McCurry himself, lauded among much of the White House press corps for his accessibility and knowledge, has come under fire for the White House pre-election blockade of information on Asian contributors. In one case, The New York Times reported that Clinton aide and confidant Bruce Lindsey mischaracterized meetings between Clinton and Asian contributors as “social visits,” and the Times editorial page said later that McCurry, the defender of the stonewall, “was left with his reliability in tatters.”

But, Hume said of McCurry: “He’s a wonderfully seasoned, likable guy.”

Early in his 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton was a study in press accessibility, meeting with reporters regularly, learning about their lives, making them feel crucial to his cause. But after the Gennifer Flowers and draft-dodging controversies engulfed the news media, Clinton withdrew and the relationship changed.

Clinton’s first White House press team did little to help things. George Stephanopoulos, his communications director at the start of the term, was regarded as aloof and arrogant by reporters, who accused him of catering only to the larger media outlets. Dee Dee Meyers, who followed Stephanopolous, was liked by many reporters, but was considered ineffective because of her lack of access to policy makers.

For a while, it appeared Clinton had the belief he could circumvent the White House press corps by appealing directly to the public via town hall formats and by granting satellite interviews to local reporters around the country. But with an onslaught of negative coverage, he soon learned otherwise.

There was a brief change in tack in May 1993, when Republican David Gergen arrived at the White House to shore up the public relations problems. Reporters were given more access, treated better and supplied with coveted anecdotes.

But by 1996, with a string of new controversies unfolding, from the FBI files to the missing Whitewater documents to the Asian fund-raising campaign, Clinton had grown more aloof, until now, when McCurry has prevailed on him to try the notion that good press relations are good public policy.

“It’s critical to develop relations with the press corps, because, essentially, you have the press literally in your living room 18 hours a day, virtually seven days a week,” said Larry Speakes, the spokesman for President Reagan. “They are there and they are going to write and it is up to you to work with them and establish relationships.”