The news media have found a new area of coverage ripe for cost-cutting: the US president.
For decades it was a given that whenever the president traveled, a charter plane packed with members of the press would travel with him. However, the press flights have been sharply curtailed in recent months, a victim of cost-cutting by news organizations that are struggling to stay profitable.
As a result, fewer reporters are tagging along with US President Barack Obama and his aides, limiting the number of news sources at a time when Americans are acutely interested in White House policies and personalities.
“The sole reason is money,” said Edwin Chen, a Bloomberg News reporter and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association.
Chen calls the cutbacks alarming and is seeking solutions.
The budget cutbacks — by news organizations as varied as USA Today and ABC News — are catching up with White House coverage, traditionally job No. 1 of the news bureaus in Washington. It is the latest sign of retrenchment, years after many regional newspapers stopped assigning reporters to the White House. Now even the big networks are feeling strained.
“I’m looking every day at ways we can cut here, cut there,” Washington bureau chief for CBS News Christopher Isham said.
When Obama visited San Francisco on Tuesday and Wednesday, for fundraisers and a tour of a solar panel company, there was no charter.
There is growing concern within the press corps that the result of all these cutbacks is less reporting about the president, coming from fewer and fewer sources. In its place, probably not coincidentally, come more shouting heads, meaning that citizens still hear and see their president constantly — but with fewer facts attached.
“This would have been unthinkable a while ago,” said Frank Sesno, former White House correspondent and Washington bureau chief for CNN.
Sesno, now the director of the school of media and public affairs at George Washington University, said the cutbacks paralleled “the ebbing of the major networks and newspapers themselves.”
Isham and other news executives say they remain committed to the White House beat, but they are looking for new and less expensive ways to work.
“We still cover the president as thoroughly and responsibly as we always have; we just have to look at the best way to do it, both logistically and financially,” said Mark Whitaker, Washington bureau chief for NBC News.
Presidential trips cost the press about US$18 million last year, according to the correspondents’ association.
“The prices are exorbitant,” ABC News president David Westin said.
Seats on a press charter plane can run US$2,000 for a domestic flight and tens of thousands overseas. ABC appears to be watching costs as it reshapes the news division, which eliminated 25 percent of its staff positions this spring.
The major television networks — ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC — represent five of seven votes for decisions about White House press travel, so when they opt not to travel in a pack, reporters of all stripes have to make other arrangements. (Chen casts the other two votes on behalf of the other correspondents.)
The skimping on charters started in the tail end of former US president George W. Bush’s administration and has deepened during Obama’s 16 months in office, particularly in the past three months, news executives say. In these cases — be they in Buffalo earlier this month or in Prague, where Obama traveled last month without a press charter for an important nuclear arms deal — the only reporters who are in the so-called presidential “bubble” are the dozen in a travel pool that fly on Air Force One and take notes and pictures for the rest of the press corps.
The rest have to buy tickets on commercial flights and hope they make it to the presidential event in time. Some decide to stay in Washington, and their newsrooms send local reporters instead, though it’s hard to say how often this occurs.
For reporters, the lack of the charter planes “severely expands the inconvenience and time away from actually covering the news,” White House correspondent for CBS Radio Mark Knoller said.
To cover Obama’s two-hour visit to the Kennedy Space Center last month, Knoller said “it took the lion’s share of three days,” because he had to catch a commercial flight to Florida a day early and stay there until the morning after the speech. Still, he saved CBS hundreds of dollars; each seat on a charter to Florida would have cost about US$2,400.
Knoller said he understood that news outlets were under “enormous pressure” to spend less.
The president’s travel has a direct impact on the profit-and-loss statements of Washington bureaus. When the administration scrapped a trip to Indonesia and Australia in the midst of the healthcare debate, news outlets faced cancelation fees of roughly US$7,500 a seat.
Sesno said some may view the reporting from the trips as a commodity, given that the president’s words echo so widely in the media.
But he asserted that by not traveling with him, “you lose the flavor, you lose the context.”
The decrease in charters has piqued attention at the White House, where Press Secretary Robert Gibbs relayed his concerns to Chen in a recent meeting.
Asked about the concerns, deputy press secretary Bill Burton, said: “You could certainly make the argument that if fewer reporters travel, fewer will have firsthand knowledge and insight to cover the president and his policies.”
Domestically, some 30 to 40 people fly on the charters when they are still ordered.
For the charters, “I don’t want to say death spiral, but it’s definitely a downward spiral,” Chen said. “The fewer organizations that travel, the higher the costs of those that do travel. The higher the costs, the more that drop out.”
News outlets also pay for seats on press planes during presidential campaigns, but network executives say it is too early to assess how they will approach the 2012 campaign.
For their part, some of the network bosses say that White House charters were probably ordered too freely in the past. Now, they happen on a case-by-case basis. For example, the planes are more imperative when the president makes multiple stops on a trip; for reporters flying commercial, it can be close to impossible to keep up.
“We’re trying to apply a little common sense to how we spend money,” Washington bureau chief for CNN David Bohrman said.
Common sense, or common penny-pinching, put 11 members of the press corps on a bus to a commencement speech delivered by Obama in southern Virginia early this month.
When the networks vetoed a charter plane for the trip, “I suggested it out of sheer frustration and sarcasm,” Chen said of the bus. “And you know what? The networks said, ‘Hey, not a bad idea.’”
At a cost of only US$200 a seat, the price could not be beat.
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