Reporter reprimanded for raising hand at White House briefing

Eric Brewer
Raw Story
May. 30, 2008

Yesterday at the White House press briefing, Dana Perino asked me to lower my hand when I raised it to ask a question. I've been attending White House briefings for over three years—first for the group blog BTC News, and since this January for RAW STORY—and I've never before seen a press secretary ask a reporter to put his or her hand down.

At the time, I thought she was winding down her answer to a question posed by April Ryan of American Urban Radio Networks regarding the Secret Service's investigation into a "noose incident" at one of its training facilities. Dana's response to April had begun like this:

"Well, as you just said, the Secret Service is investigating the incident and as you just said also, they have not completed that investigation, so I'm not going to get ahead of them and I'll let them do that."

Since the White House has a policy of not commenting on ongoing investigations, I thought she was about to move on, so at that point I raised my hand. I was sitting in Helen Thomas's seat (Helen was absent) in the middle of the front row, so I was face to face with Dana. Although a couple of other reporters in the front row raised their hand at the same time, Dana singled me out for criticism, interrupting her answer to complain:

"Can you please put your hand down for a second so I can concentrate on April."

I complied, but continued to raise it, at appropriate times, throughout the rest of the briefing, during which Dana ignored me completely.

Dana has spontaneously called on me only two times in the four months I've attended her briefings (a third instance came about only because Les Kinsolving shamed her into it). Her deputies, Tony Fratto and Scott Stanzel, have each called on me once. Between the three of them, they've ignored my attempts to ask a question on twenty occasions. So they've willingly called on me 16% of the time, and ignored or tried to ignore me 84% of the time. That makes it hard to do my job. Every other reporter who gets a seat in the first five rows of the briefing room (I've been in the first three rows all this year) gets called on as often as he or she wants, some several times a day. The only exception that I know of happened last year when Tony Snow ignored Kinsolving three days in a row for asking what Tony considered to be irrelevant questions. Dana, however, calls on Kinsolving at every briefing, and he asks two questions each time.

I've been attending White House briefings since March 2005 and have interacted with two other press secretaries: Scott McClellan and Tony Snow. I estimate that both Scott and Tony called on me about 60% of the time.

So why is Dana so much more intransigent than her predecessors? Are my questions too tough? Does she think I'm not a real journalist? I really don't know.

The first question that I asked during Dana's tenure as press secretary was on January 17 of this year, when I asked her deputy Tony Fratto whether the surge had set back Iraq's domestic security plans by five years, as statements by President Bush and Iraqi security officials seemed to indicate. Dana must not have liked that question, because she conspicuously ignored me during my next three visits to the briefing room, relenting only on February 27, when I asked whether President Bush's observation on the counterproductivity of "outside forces" applied to Iraq as well as to countries in Africa. That one must not have gone over that well with the White House either, because it was another three weeks before I got to ask another one, on March 19.

That last question, about the President's warning of the danger of al Qaeda taking over Iraq's oil, got quite a bit of attention. And Dana, who during her answer denied that that was what the President had said, got some unwelcome attention as well, when our exchange made it onto MSNBC's Countdown. After that, it was a whole six weeks before I got to ask another question, and then it only happened because Les Kinsolving intervened on my behalf. That question, about the Pentagon's recently disclosed and probably illegal secret domestic propaganda program, only seemed to alienate her further, since she's ignored my attempts to follow up on it four times since then. (Her deputy, Scott Stanzel, did call on me once, on May 19.)

The question I didn't get to ask yesterday was:

"Has the President ever attended a meeting with a group of TV military analysts coordinated by the Pentagon?"

As Salon's Glenn Greenwald first pointed out, on March 16, 2006, the Pentagon's Director of the Office of Public Liaison Dallas Lawrence wrote in an email regarding the military analyst program: "I'd love to see if we could get them in with potus as well (I think that was submitted to karl and company from Dorrance Smith last week." Dorrance Smith is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs. "Karl" is, almost certainly, Karl Rove. And "potus" is, of course, President Bush.

Apparently, no one else in the White House press corps is interested in asking about this issue. I wish I could get an answer out of Dana for the millions of Americans who want one, but the only response I got from the White House on Wednesday was "put your hand down."

This video is from The White House, broadcast May 21, 2008.

Download video

The preceding article was a White House report from Eric Brewer, who will periodically attend White House press briefings for Raw Story. Brewer is also a contributor at BTC News. He was the first reporter to ask about the Downing Street memo and the Pentagon analysts scandal at White House briefings.