What it’s like to question the most powerful office in the nation? An S-R reporter shares his experience in the White House Briefing Room

WASHINGTON – The first thing I noticed when I walked into the White House Briefing Room on Friday was just how small the place is.

Forty-nine seats take up most of the space, clad in blue faux-leather upholstery that belies the room’s origin in 1969, when a newly elected Richard Nixon had it built atop the indoor swimming pool Franklin D. Roosevelt used to ease his polio symptoms. While the setting is less than stately, those seats confer an opportunity to question the most powerful office in the country, something that wasn’t lost on me.

After a year on the job as The Spokesman-Review’s reporter in the nation’s capital, the end of most COVID-19 restrictions at the White House brought my first chance to attend a news briefing in the cramped confines reserved for correspondents and photographers in the West Wing.

I’m not the first reporter to represent a Spokane newspaper at the White House. The late Bob Rose covered D.C. for the S-R and the Daily Chronicle from 1983 to 1987, but his last time in the Briefing Room came before I was born. Let’s just say I was feeling a little pressure when I walked through those doors.

I arrived early, since some veteran journalists had warned me I’d have trouble finding a desk, and wandered through the office space that adjoins the briefing room until a kind CNN reporter offered to show me around. The tour didn’t take long, and he was careful to point out all the places we weren’t allowed to go without special permission.

After meeting a few White House aides I’d corresponded with only by email, I settled in at a desk in the basement that was likely once used to store coal, according to the White House Historical Association. The veneer on the desktop was cracked by water damage – perhaps the inevitable result of putting office space in a former swimming pool – and my neighbor casually remarked a mouse had just run past his foot. A moment later, a yelp from across the room told us which direction the mouse had been headed.

Around the corner, radio and TV reporters filed their reports with that unnatural cadence that sounds out of place everywhere but on the airwaves. Reporters joked about the upcoming vote for president of the White House Correspondents Association, a group that advocates for transparency from the presidency and was known, pre-pandemic, for throwing a glitzy dinner each year.

Not long before the 12:15 p.m. briefing was set to begin, it was delayed by 30 minutes, to the surprise of none of the seasoned reporters around me. I scribbled questions on a notepad, unsure if I would get the chance to ask even one. With the start time approaching, I headed upstairs and settled into the seat I’ll share from now on with other members of the Regional Reporters Association of outlets around the country.

A voice over the PA system gave a 2-minute warning, and soon after, Press Secretary Jen Psaki strode out from the door beside her podium, greeted the press corps and expertly cruised through a few minutes of announcements before giving the chance to ask the first question to the Associated Press reporter who sits front and center.

“Is the infrastructure agreement already stuck in a pothole?” the AP reporter asked Psaki, referring to the deal President Joe Biden had announced a day earlier between Republican and Democratic senators. Thus began a series of questions about the top stories of the day, to which the spokeswoman had prepared answers.

Each time Psaki neared the end of a response, hands shot up around the room. I shifted awkwardly in my seat, painfully aware of the loud squeak my cheap suit produced every time it rubbed against the blue vinyl cushion, but committed to sitting up as straight as I could to make myself visible. My heart started racing when the press secretary called on someone directly in front of me, trying to figure out if “You, in the middle” meant me. (It didn’t.)

After several questions about the Justice Department suing Georgia over voting rights and the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, whose leaders visited Biden at the White House later that day, Psaki pointed to me.

I asked her which Western states’ governors would be attending a meeting with Biden the next week on drought and wildfires. The governors of Washington, Idaho and Montana would not be there, she told me. While hardly a groundbreaking revelation, it was a question no other reporter was likely to ask, since The Spokesman-Review is the only paper in the Northwest with a reporter in D.C.

I filed a story on her answer later that day.

I look forward to more White House briefings and more incisive questions about the federal government’s impact on our region, but my first day in the Briefing Room solidified in my mind why it’s so important for local news outlets to have a presence in our nation’s capital.