yet, some totally destroyed. you'll see some trailers in front of the homes where people are working on them, but you're not going to see the vibrant community it once was. more from the tenth anniversary programming on hurricane katrina, including this entire hearing, and more from people on the ground about the storm. tonight at 8:00 p.m. eastern time on c-span. a group of reporters discuss their jobs covering the white house and the changing relationship between presidential administrations and the press corps. correspondents peter baker of "the new york times," jim avila of abc news, ap reporter josh lederman and scott horsley of npr, participate in this national journal event. >> everyone else is going back to work. i hope that doesn't make your competitive anxiety set in. this is a great group. thank you all for coming and taking time out of your news day to be part of this conversation. this is, of course, our annual scholarship panel. we have our 17 scholarship winners sitting in the front. they'll get a chance to ask a few questions as we go along here. i hope this will be valuable for everybody. the practicing journalists in the room, too. even if you've been covering the white house for 10 years, 20 years, there's always something to learn from your colleagues who do it well. that's who is on the panel today. these are the four white house correspondents among the winners of our whca excellence in performance of journalism awards this year. i'll introduce them to you by name. and then we're going to -- they're going to tell some stories for us and give us some of the tricks of the trade. i'm co-hosting this with carol lee, the vice president of whca. she is the white house correspondent for "the wall street journal." she breaks a lot of news at the white house. she does domestic, she does foreign. we chase her all the time. it's great to have her perspective on the panel, too. immediately to my left is josh lederman of the associated press. he works at the white house booth of the ap jim avila works for abc news. my old colleague from chicago. he now covers the white house for abc. scott horsley is white house correspondent for npr and a member of the whca board. peter baker is correspondent for "the new york times." and, of course, carol lee. so, yeah, let's give them a hand. [ applause ] >> thank you. i really love the range of winners we have this year because when you put this group of four people together and look at the way they've covered the beat, they really show a diverse approach to covering the white house. each has excelled in sort of a distinct way of doing their job. i want to start with josh lederman, who did some classic beat reporting on the secret service. has everybody heard of the fence jumper? you know what a fence jumper is? okay. that's a person who climbs over the fence of the white house and typically gets tackled before they make it across the north lawn. but one night, that was not the case. and josh lederman was standing his post at the ap booth. why don't you pick it up from there. >> i think it was around 8:00 p.m. or so. most of the correspondents at the white house had already left for the evening. the news day was basically over. there were a handful of us from the wires and from a few of the television networks who were still in the building. started to hear a commotion outside the doors of the press briefing room. a few of us ran outside to see what was going on. it seemed from the flurry of activity of the secret service, there was something going on. now, those of us that are spending a decent amount of time at the white house, know that lockdowns at the white house are relatively routine. even fence-jumpers happen, you know, three, four times a year. you know, it's an event but not particularly a remarkable one. but there seemed to be something -- a level of alarm that the secret service was displaying that suggested that this may have been a little bit something out of the ordinary. i headed into the press area of the white house, which is sort of at the entrance to the west wing, for those of you who haven't spent a lot of time there. to try and figure out if i could figure out what was going on. nobody had any -- they said, no, everything is fine. we would have gotten an e-mail if something had happened. nobody had gotten an e-mail. right about that moment, secret service agents came -- stormed in from the west wing with these really large, semi-automatic weapons. you've seen the secret service carry them around. they're the counter -- you know, their tactical teams sort of on the grounds of the white house, but it was the first time i'd ever seen one of those out and sort of in shooting position inside the actual west wing. they immediately pulled us all, those of us in the press offices, down into the west wing and into the basement. so, it ended up that i was down in the basement with most of the white house officials, you know, obama's senior adviser and his communications director, who were also being evacuated first into the basement and shortly thereafter outside into this middle ground between the entrance to the west wing and the eisenhower executive office building. this is another one of the indications that something was happening that might have been a little bit different than the usual fence-jumper who hops over, you know, the dogs nab him and it's kind of end of story, you know, game over. the fact that they had evacuated most of the white house. in my 2 1/2 years at the white house, i could not remember at any time when there had really been an evacuation of the white house. you could tell from the way that they were -- the secret service was first trying to make sure that any foreign nationals that had been in the building were out and escorted out to the street, and just from their general behavior, that there was something more to this story than a usual fence-jumper. >> how were you able -- you put something on the wire before midnight that night. how were you able to confirm something enough to start the wire reporting? >> the first report i came came from a uniformed secret service agent who was not really supposed to be talking to the press but was in this fray of people running around and basically told us there was somebody that hopped the fence and that's what we're dealing with. so from my phone i filed a quick story that hit the wire around 8:00, 8:30 about that situation. but the secret service really went on lockdown. they wouldn't talk to anyone. they told us they were scramb scrambling people to come down to their headquarters to start dealing with this. but they were getting their ducks in a row before they started talking to anyone. around 10:00 p.m. or so they kicked us out of the white house, as they do in the evenings. i relocated to my apartment and we continued to just really try and hammer all of our sources to try to figure out what exactly had gone on. and right around midnight we found out that, yes, had been a fence-jumper, but not only that, but he had actually made it inside the white house. which was an unprecedented security breach that raised all kinds of confess about whether the security protocols that they have to respond to fence-jumpers is really adequate. ed we knew this was going to be a big story. so we popped out an alert around midnight and from there started building a breaking story, trying to wrap in both the details of what had happened in this one incident and sort of the broader implications for the secret service. >> you did some reporting by twitter that night, is that right? >> one of the problems was this a friday evening, very late, and there was no one around. and the kind of flurry of reaction you would start getting unsolicited on a thursday afternoon or something from members of congress and 30 interest groups that want quotes in your stories, you know, were all asleep or drunk or at their parties or doing something else. i happened to notice a tweet from congressman jason chaffetz of utah, who at that point was going to be the incoming chairman of the house insight panel with jurisdictions over the secret service, saying something about how alarming it was. i made contact with him through twitter only to find out he was on a plane flying home to his district and was not going to be landing until, you know, something like 3:00 a.m. or 4:00 a.m. d.c. time. but was able to get him to agree to do an e-mail interview over his -- using his in-flight wireless while he was on the flight. so, through that process we were able to learn that there had been another -- a series of other security breaches that he had been investigating for more than a year, and to be able to get that context and his reaction into the story as well. >> that is shoe leather reporting in the digital age. i want to pause on that story right now. i just want to make this comment for the young journalists in the room. this is -- to me, this speaks volumes about the importance of beat reporting at the white house. because if the reporters hadn't been there, the statement from the secret service would have been, nothing to see here. don't worry about it. and also if josh hadn't been there on such a regular basis and sort of understood the rhythm of the white house and realized that something really important was happening and sort of being able to pinpoint where it was happening, that's all -- that's all part of one of the -- part of the beat reporters' tool kit. let's pause there and go to a beat reporter who did something totally different when the story started to break about the warming of relations between the u.s. and cuba. he reported at the white house but then he got on a plane. tell us that story. >> this is about the release of allen gross, who was a hostage in prison in cuba for five years. how it started is it's really a combination of sources at the white house, sources in cuba. i've been covering cuba since the pope went there back in '96 intermittent intermittently, so i had sources there. was there during the elian crisis, too. so, i had sources there and worked them as well as working the white house sources and also some sources in town who represented allen gross as well. i first started getting interested in the story because i wanted to interview allen gross. that was sort of the impetus of it. he was in prison and i thought, i wanted to go back to cuba. i thought that would be a good way to do it, to try to get an interview with him. as i started making inquiries about that to the cuban government, they said, well, you know, we don't think that's going to happen. allen says he's going to die at the end of the year by starving himself to death. we're not really going to give him any interviews. so that was sort of the start. then i went to his -- we found out who his attorney was. we started working him about, you know, can we get in there? can we get some video of him? can we do something? and we started getting hints from sources that something was in the works. that perhaps he would -- that the united states -- neither cuba nor the united states wanted this man to die in prison. neither side did. but there was -- the issue was that there were five cubans who were in the united states in prison, and three of them were still in prison, two of them had been released, and the cubans wanted a prisoner exchange. the united states didn't want to do a prisoner exchange. they were debating about it, they were talking about it. and so i started working the white house -- my white house sources. and trying to find out what stage they were in. and at first it was just sort of, well, something -- the word i remember clearly was, a very high-up source in the national security counsel telling me that something was percolating. and that was about two months before the release, i think it was. and it's interesting where this happened, too. i will say that one of the things that we are getting away from, the networks especially, and i think some magazines and newspapers as well, trying to get away from is traveling with the president all the time. but one of the -- and we keep pushing back to our bosses about, at least at the network level, is that, yes, there may not be huge stories we're going to break on these trips with the president when he goes places, but we have unusual access during -- my colleagues know that. we have unusual access to the people who normally don't -- may not return your call when you're in washington. but when you're in china or you're in burma or you're in hawaii for two weeks with the president, there's a lot of time to talk informally with people who are your sources. and it was on one of these trips where a very high-up person told me, before the end of the year. so we had -- we sort of knew -- we worked it, we focused on that. all this time we weren't doing any stories about it. this was all groundwork. we didn't do -- we did an occasional piece how allen gross was and what his physical condition was. in general we weren't doing stories every day on it. i was going about my other work. and then we actually nailed down the week it was going to happen. when i nailed down the week it was going to happen from a source not at the white house, i went to the white house. and i said, look, i'm about to report this. is that going to -- this was an interesting question for you guys to talk about, as students, about how -- and my colleagues as well. we went to the white house and i said, this is what i have. i know it's going to happen this week before he goes on his vacation. if i report this, is that going to jeopardy allen gross's life because he had threatened to kill himself if he didn't get released. the white house said, well, let me get back to you. and they did. to their credit, they did get back to me. they said, okay, you have it. it is going to happen on that day. here's the deal. if you don't -- if you wait, and we'll -- you can report it first, and then we'll verify it with everybody else afterwards, immediately afterwards. as soon as he wheels up and out of cuban air space and, therefore, he's safe. and so my producer and i, who is here, flew to miami and waited for a call from josh earnest. and i was in front of a live camera, i got a call from josh earnest, we went with the story and broke it on "good morning america." and part of the deal was that our anchor, david muir, would get an interview with president obama about the -- this was not just about prisoner exchange but was in fact the beginning of a new era of relations between our two countries and david muir was able to sit down with president obama and talk with him about that. i went on from miami to cuba and reported that evening on the evening news about the reaction in cuba. >> i guess i would highlight one point that he made in all of that, which is an incredible story. and that is that he did not get his very solid information from inside the white house. that is most often the case, the best stuff comes not from them. and, you know, you -- so often you have something from somewhere else and then you go to them. >> right. >> if they want to play ball, which they clearly did with you, then they will. if not, then you have a choice to make to do your own story either way. i guess the question for you is, if you -- did they make his life as threatened case to you, or did they say, no, but if you wait, we'll do this? >> the case they made was if we were to -- what they were concerned about, i have to be careful a little bit because some of it is off-the-record conversations. in general what the white house was concerned about was inflaming miami before it happened. and in some way, that would cause some kind of incident that would stop the negotiations. and, therefore, indirectly put allen gross's life in jeopardy because he had threatened his own life at the end of the year. this was december 17th, so this was getting close to the end of the year. so they made that -- they didn't have to make that case that strongly. they said, you know, this could foul up the negotiations. there wasn't any -- and they made it clear to me there was nobody right now who is anywhere near as close to the story as you are. it's not going to break somewhere else. if you're patient, you'll have a much better story. we won't jeopardize the man's life. we decided that we would -- we had a good clean kill, we might as well just stay with that. >> how do you develop a source like that whom you -- who will tell you at a critical moment it's percolating and have enough knowledge of that person's workings to know that you would trust them and read them correctly? >> well, part of it is, you know, who they are. this person was involved in the negotiations. so if you know that, if you know that somebody has that kind of direct -- this was not a third party. this was not someone in the press office. this was not a secretary or something like that. this was an individual who was directly involved. so, i'm -- and how do we get to know them? we get to know them by being there and going on these trips. and, you know, you have to say, too, and each one of us works for -- on this panel works for distinguished organizations. it's not necessarily the reporter in general. they're not -- it's also because of our audience and our readership. you know, we have -- you work for an organization that has some influence, and that does help. i mean, ip -- i don't have to tell everybody what everybody does here, but certainly everyone on this panel have influential viewers. we have massive viewers as opposed to maybe less influential than "the new york times" or npr. we have 10 million, 12 million viewers that evening. and so when they want to talk, they want to talk to us. so that's one of the ways. >> i want to go now to scott horsley. everybody listens to npr here, right? i love scott's reports because i know when i hear his voice, i tune in because he's chosen something complicated and he's going to explain it to me in a way that makes sense. one of my personal favorites is the pension smoothing, his explanation of the concept of pension smoothing by comparing it to a pension smoothie. and then he -- i think there was even a blender in the audio somewhere. anyway, scott, could you talk a little bit about how the approach the story. which stories you choose, what you're looking for at the white house, what your general approach is. >> sure. had obviously some of the stuff is the same as anybody on the panel. you get good sources, good information. the twist with radio is we don't have the advantage of pictures, so we try to bring sound into stories, whether it's the blender of the smoothie or anything else. i have to say, sound is the one thing the white house thinks not at all about. i don't know how many times we've been on the road with the president and they will have choreographed an absolutely beautiful picture at the golden hour. he's standing in front of a -- you know, a colonial building in cartahena, and the sun is sinking to the right angle. it's gorgeous and they say let's go to the vans and the children's choir starts singing. we say, that would have been nice. or on the campaign trail, the president was -- loved to visit factories. and they would always shut the factory down, assembly line or whatever it was, so that he could go through and take a tour and there would be no sound. it would be sort of an industrial hum. at one point i complained to somebody on the advance team and said, once in a while it would be nice to hear what a factory sounds like. so they took us to a spaghetti sauce bottling plant. and maybe this is -- i learned a lesson why they shut down at assembly line, because all the people on the assembly line crowded around to get their picture taken with the president. and it was like lucille ball. a little piece of cardboard got caught in the conveyor belt and the spaghetti -- we said, okay. we couldn't use that sound anyway. part of the trick is to try to think about some sound that will make the story come alive. you know, the sound might be a blender, might be kids singing. i was really frustrated on our recent trip. we stopped in jamaica before we went down to panama to meet with the cuban leader. and the first thing the president did was go to the bob marley museum. but they didn't let the full press pool into the museum. they only let still photographers. so, there was some great pictures of the president looking at the old marley albums or whatnot. but it was especially frustrating to me, because from our vantage point just outside the door, you could hear ever so faintly strains of "one love," which would have been nice for our radio story on arrival in kingston, but we didn't get it. >> actually, scott, e-mailed me from that. whenever there's a problem with access in this way, the board and the members of the pool start lining up e-mail and we're communicating to each other about problems. we advocating with the white house. and then he told me the soundtrack to this huge conflagration in kingston was "one love" by bob marley. how much -- what mix are you looking for at the white house? you do a lot of explanatory journalism, you also break news and you do the story of the day. are you looking for a particular mix in your beat reporting? >> i think -- i mean, we obviously try to report the news of the day. we want to be -- there was a time when npr saw itself as a supplementary news source. we figured all of our listeners were getting the breaking news from their local paper and we were going to the next day analysis. the old joke in our company was do the news a day late and call it analysis. but, for better or worse, for many people we're not a secondary news source anymore, we're a primary news source. so we feel compelled to actually just keep up with the same day's news. but oftentimes what differentiates us is our sort of explanatory journalism or our context. you know, you mentioned josh's experience. after 2 1/2 years, you can sort of say, okay, this is something that's unusual. obviously, someone like peter can say, even with greater perspective, this is unprecedented or this is not at all unprecedented, this is exactly what's happened in three or four previous administrations. i think one of the things we try to bring to the beat is some sense of context, some sense of history. some sense when the president is being pressed to respond to ferguson, well, this has been something that has dogged the president from skip gates, you know. to bring some of that history to bear. >> that's a great transition to peter bashg of the new york -- of the new york times who has covered three presidents in three different eras. in fact, in the past year, has written about the obama white house, the clinton candidacy and the bush family attempt to build a dynasty. so, talk to us a little about the changes you've seen. how does this -- covering this administration compare to the others you've covered? >> yeah, that's a great question. and scott's right, in om ways there's nothing new under the sun, right? every white house i think comes into office thinking, you know, we just reinvented the wheel here. we'll do it differently than everybody else has done it before. we're hot stuff because we won a national campaign. and they are hot stuff because they did, you know, something rather extraordinary which is convince a majority or enough americans to give them their votes to send them into power. they come in and they're certain they will do it in some way that's never been done before. particularly in the first year, the first two years of an administration, you hear a lot of first times and never befores and it's just -- and mark knows and a lot of the guys -- steve, wherever -- and dave jackson, george certainly knows, very few things have never been done before, at least on some level. now, it's done differently. the modalities are different. we're doing twitter and -- what's the one -- mircat and all these things. >> he looks at me. as if i would know. >> you're young and hip. i don't know what that is. i don't know what mere cat is. >> it's a little animal. >> that's what i thought. so, some aspects of it are different, right? but that's about modalities and tactics, not about broader themes. and so as you watch the obama white house struggle with its second term, it feels pretty familiar to anybody who watched bill clinton struggle with his second term or george w. bush struggle with his second term. it's not the same. obviously, katrina is not the same thing as a broken website, and, you know, syria is not the same thing as an impeachment, and so each of these are different, but a lot of the broad strokes, the larger currents of politics and governance are familiar. and as scott said, it's great to keep that in mind when we do our reporting and to try to help readers and listeners and viewers understand the perspective of what's going on. and so i think that's -- that's what makes the job fun in a lot of ways. >> so you have the perspective that many of us envy, which is the historical -- what other presidents have done perspective. how do you maintain what other people envy, which is fresh eyes and a new take. so, how do you work that into your reporting? >> that's a great question. in fact, it's -- i do struggle with every once in a while waking up saying, that's not a story. we've done it before. heard it before. nothing new. and somebody else manages, in fact, to take whatever it is and find the fresh aspect of it. in fact, bring the new eyes to and make a great story. and i kick myself for being too fuddy duddy. but i'm lucky i have -- like all of us, we all have partners. i have two great partners, who are both seasoned and veterans but also bring a freshness to it. and so that helps to have perspective and to bring different strengths to a team like that. and then i usually read about it in "the wall street journal" and carol's done it and i'm an idiot for not having recognized the great potential of some great story. >> one ki just say one thing? as i was thinking about doing this panel, as radio reporters and tv reporters, we get the benefit of the print pool reports. one one print -- one print reporter is assigned each day to write up whatever the president does. and when christi or peter or carol do pool duty, you know, all these folks who have had lots of experience and could easily phone it in, they never phone it in. their pool reports are so thorough, so detailed, even on a completely throw-away trip, and i think the one lesson of that is, you never know what's going to be throw-away six weeks later. you never know when some seemingly meaningless detail on a nothing venture to cleveland to give a speech that nobody is going to care about two days later will take on an added resonance six months down the road. and because they pay attention every day and don't phone it in, they -- six months down the road when it's meaningful, they have that. >> so, that's the concept of the pool. you guys know how a pool operates, right? we spend a lot of our time as an association fighting for the access of the pool. when we can't get in, the whole press corps into something, we send in an elect group of usually 13 people when we're traveling, 20 people when we're in the white house, so gather information and their first responsibility is to share it with the rest of us and the rest of the people who use the platform, the print poolers share our reporting with everybody else in america, really. before we write our own stories based on it, but that's because it's a big responsibility and we feel like the public has a right to know and that's our -- that's a public service that we perform. so, i want to ask the people -- peter, i can't help but notice you've got some documentation sitting over there, which may help to answer this question. but what are the big challenges -- what do you think are the biggest challenges for you in covering the white house and how do you overcome them? >> yeah, not that i'm hyping up rival publications, but i have some interest in this organization politico. they did do a survey as they did last year of the white house correspondents in time for this annual event. it's actually pretty useful. for anybody who hasn't read it take a look. they got about 70 of us to respond this year, a pretty decent number, and they ask pretty decent questions. some of them are surprising and some of them aren't. asked of those who have covered multiple white houses, which are the most friendly. 3% mentioned barack obama being the most friendly. and 65% the least friendly of them. partly that's because we're in the middle of it. partly because we're frustrated with them or that and we have glossed over all the frustration we had with bush and clinton and so forth. it tells you that's part of the adversarial relationship that goes with that. the other finding i thought was interesting. how many times you ask a president yourself at a press conference. 63% of our colleagues said never. how many of you have interviewed the president yourself or as part of an organization? 80% of our colleagues say never. to me, that's a shame. to me, the most telling one is how often have you interviewed someone in the last week from the white house who isn't paid to talk to you, not a press staffer, and 58% of our colleagues said never in the last week. and, you know, okay we're not all going to get a chance to ask the president a question at a press conference and we're not all going to get a chance to interview him as often as we would like, but we ought to be able to talk to people in the white house that go beyond the press staff. three out of five of us haven't been able to get past that wall in the last week. that tells us something about the nature of the white house. i think if you talk to your colleagues here who have done it longer than i have, you'll hear stories about how under bush 41 and other administrations, they had a lot more contact with a whole lot of senior people beyond the office. and i've seen in three administrations how that's shrunken slowly and surely with each passing one. what do do as a white house correspondent? you have to be like josh, be there all the time, to recognize opportunities to take that knowledge and translate it into big stories at the right moment. have you to use sources outside the white house to come back to the white house, right, as we did with cuba -- as we heard about cuba right here, and push them to answer our questions when they're not going to volunteer it. you know, you have to be listening, literally, for sound. have you to take all those experiences, i think, and not count on our white house officials to necessarily hand things over because they're really not going to do that. >> sorry. go ahead. >> i wanted to ask a different question. >> go for it. >> one of the things that's come up a lot is with the ability for the white house to now go to twitter and facebook and interviews with youtube stars and local news anchors at the white house and a whole host of folks who are -- i mean, if you looked at the president's interview, he largely does them mostly with people who are not in the white house covering him on a day-to-day basis and are very familiar with his policies and where he's been and where he might be going and all of that. they're kind of parachuted in, do an interview and parachute out. so it's raised the question of does being a white house correspondent matter? and i guess i'd put that question to you guys, of does it matter? why does it matter? and if people can get information from elsewhere, what's the difference? >> i think you need it all. you know, i don't think it hurts to have outside people come in and ask questions. we are in a bubble. you know, we are -- we have to recognize that. where we live, where we work. i know you do and i know most many of us do, we try to get out of that. you know, and i'm lucky in that i have a partner as well who does most of the -- most of the day-to-day. i go in and i try to work outside that box. i don't -- i can't blame the white house for wanting to get outside of that room and to -- because when i do, when i go to denver, when i go to seattle, they're not talking about the same things we are talking about. they're not focused on that. they're not focused on the intricacies that we are. and i think where we see that most, carol, is at the white house briefing. the -- too often the quest, in my opinion, has been to get -- to get an argument going, to get some kind of conflict. there are very few questions or there are not enough questions, let me put it that way, that are actually asked to elicit information. now, yes, the follow-ups have to often be more combative because the information isn't coming. but the original question is frequently not -- is designed to pick a fight rather than to seek some information. and i think people outside the beltway, when i visit them, are tired of that. it's part of the noise. and they want the kinds of questions that sometimes we hear, when the local northeast news people come in from out of town and they're in the white house briefing room, they ask something none of us is thinking of. their viewers in denver care about it. i think we need both. we need the inside baseball stuff on occasion. i think they're wise and -- to go outside of us, myself. >> i do -- i think you are right about some of the combativeness. you know, it struck me during the va hospital scandal, the va has been a mess for years through republican and democratic administrations. i think the american public generally would like to see the va hospital system work better than it does. and i think there's no reason that has to be a political scandal. i don't know why eric shinseki's scout became the story. as opposed to what's it going to take to actually fix the va hospital system. once shinseki was out, we in the white house briefing room kind of lost interest in the story, and maybe to that extent maybe the administration lost a little focus on it, too. i would -- i do think there's something to what you're saying about the combative tone of the washington centric news media. i also think when you talk about the challenges of the baeshgts my colleague alex chad wick used to say, if you get to a story and there's a whole bunch of reporters already there, go find a different story. which i think is very good advice generally, but not terribly applicable to what we do. i mean, it's pretty rare, unless you get a good scoop on cuba, it's pretty rare that you're going to really be in a whole different playing field than your dozens of very talented colleagues on this beat. >> but imph you do, those are some of the most important moments. i think we're all intimately and painfully aware that we're no longer the only game in town. you know, there's nobody up here sitting here from, you know, medium or, you know, all of these tumblr or other ways people are getting their information. that's also created some issues not only with outside media coming in, but also the white house just completely bypassing the media and going to people through their own social media channels. i think that the aspect that we maintain as beat reporters at the white house, is the accountability function. and that's one that is not -- that people that parachute in for a story are not in a good position to really do. you know, it's that one phrase that they've been using, you know, for a month and suddenly it disappears, and you notice it because you've been hearing it of day. it turns out there's a policy change underneath, you know, or it's the -- you know, the issue that you press deeper and, like, jim, you break a major, important story, you know, or uncover some type of shenanigans that, you know, are not likely to be uncovered by someone who is coming in because the white house is trying to reach, you know, a different segment of the population. >> i don't personally object to the white house running an offense. i think they can -- it's up to them to craft their message and try to explain their policies and beliefs in a way that's persuasive. if they want to speak directly to the american public by whatever medium is available to them, i actually don't object to that at all. my concern is that when -- that they not go around the independent free and adversarial press corps, which is at the white house every day and has this kind of situational awareness that you're talking about. i like the diversity of voices. i like vice and medium and, you know -- pick your ak crow anymore. i like them all. i think more voices is better. but we need information to work with. and i feel like the beat reporters are a critical part of that mix. so, now we've got about 20 minutes left to take some questions. i'm looking out at the scholarship winners. i will start with you. >> so, you've mentioned medium, that's come up a lot. i notice the clinton camp used that yesterday to respond to the donor thing. do you think -- because i know there's definitely been an uptick with the obama administration using social media and other means of getting information out, and you talked about that a lot. is that a precedent that you think we're going to see going forward or is that something that's specific to this administration? >> oh, i can't imagine that the next administration will do any less. they'll probably have even more tools, i would imagine, to sidestep the free and independent and adversarial press, is that what you said? >> yes. in alphabetical order. i mean, that's part of the challenge of fighting, is being vigilant, because the thing i need to worry about is something i probably haven't heard of yet, right? the next -- whatever the next invention is. >> josh the press secretary said when we challenged him one time, he said, look, any administration would do this if they have the tools we have. it's hard to argue with that. >> i think what you hit on, though, it's fine for them to find all these other things. if they were doing that and not answering questions at a daily briefing or not making the president available, which he has recently been very available, as far as press conferences are concerned. a unique rash of press conferences lately. then that would be an issue, i think. but as long as -- i mean, if he wants -- if they want to put out an unfiltered message -- first of all, our audiences are smart enough to know that that's an unfiltered message. they really are. we have to give our audience some credit. that's fine. but if they did that and then the president didn't come out or josh didn't come out and sit in front of us, to me, that would be an issue. but it's not -- i don't find it an issue as long as they continue to do that. i think there is an issue what peter was saying, though, is that they do not make people outside the press office available. that can be a problem. i have to say, maybe i would doubt that you have that problem. and i don't really have that problem. but i understand that smaller, perhaps smaller -- that's what i was talking about our organizations we work for. smaller organizations, i think, have -- or maybe smaller and perhaps fox news and some others, that they would deem as combative, might have an issue. but i don't. >> i think -- i mean, different organizations get different responses, it's true. but we have the same problem, i think, actually. and i think, again, it's mostly just how things have changed over time. i was saying to tom de franco earlier, thinking about his days when he covered the ford -- vice president was on the plane all the time, talking to the vice president all day. we don't do that today. when jim baker was chief of staff, every day at end of the day he called back reporters. i can't remember the last time dennis mcdonough made a round of calls at the end of the day to a bunch of reporters. he tries, i'm not criticizing him particularly. i'm just saying the culture has changed. and the culture is that the people who are actually involved in a lot of these decision-makings are less available, more removed and more separated from us by a paid staff that is paid to get between us. >> i remember reading one of ryan liz's great pieces in the "new yorker" one day and he talked b i wandered down to the nfc offices. >> with an escort. >> i thought, wow. imagine that, just wandering around the west ring and. >> that's something maybe a lot of the younger -- unlike congress, right, you can walk around congress and you'll have 535 sources willing to talk to you for the most part, right? >> begging to talk to you. >> begging to talk to you. the white house physically, you are not able to go very far. you are restricted to a very tiny space, basically, which is -- >> the vestibule. >> that's right. that's why josh and scott, the ones who spend all day there are heroes in my mind because it's incredibly cramped and claustrophobic. you cannot wander the halls. you cannot knock on somebody's door and say, hey, guys, what's going on? yeah. probably, like in the dod you have -- the reporters there will tell you, you have a lot more availability to walk around. i think that's true at state. it's a shame. it means that fewer nonscripted, spontaneous conversations that would lead to understanding and clarity. >> did you have a question? >> yes, i did have a question. earlier in the roundtable discussion you spoke about the leverage journalists have over the white house where they can possibly produce a story through social media with their twitter sxhajdz say, hey, this is what happened. yet we're sitting here wondering, did this really happen? what leverage were you speak of that we have to -- to tell our story to the viewers? like you said, we can reach tens of millions of viewers at one time, so why not come to us? >> great question. >> what i think i meant is historically we had more leverage. any administration which ultimately was going to have to be responsive to voters, even if they didn't like the press kind of had to deal with us to get their message out. that is still true. i mean, i think the public still does distinguish what they read in the new yooeshew york -- "thk times" or see on abc from what comes out in "the west wing week," on the white house website. i hope they do. but that leverage is less than it used to be because they do have more avenues to distribute their message without us. so, i think -- you know, in the old days, like it or not, they kind of had to deal with us. that's less true than it used to be. >> i was in on that conversation you were referring to, i think what scott was saying the mill readers listeners and viewers. and that's hard to turn away. >> and they really do not like having the photos described as, you know, state-run media. and so when we do -- when we go public with our complaints and we do it in a united way, which we don't do very often, but occasionally when they really tick us off we do. that tends to get the president's attention. and that trickles down. >> even when we're not doing it publicly we're always every day in there pushing at increasing increments of ire and anxiety as we do. and that's often effective because of the leverage we do have. yes? [ inaudible question ] between you as correspondents and those folks actually making policy. r'gton in the last 30 years there's been like a threefold -- or like 300% increase in the number of journalists has gone down. and i'm wondering they create kind of these pseudo events and try to kind of set the agenda for the day. and that's their job, but i'm wondering how do you find something else there, something unique there? >> we pretty much ignore it. i'd say we ignore the staged events. because he wants to announce a new thing on trade. so he goes to a port. i can't remember the last time we did a story whatever their agenda for the day was. television news doesn't really work that54 way. we go in case something unusual happens at that event, but we don't cover that event. what we try to do -- you know, what i try to do, i speak for myself in this, is, you know, focus on things that i'm interested in that i think our viewers are interested in. and not worry about their agenda, about the white house agen agenda. and come from the outside in. come with information that they can't ignore. because they know my 10 million viewers at 6:30 are going to see this information. they need to get their spin on it. they need to get their information out about that particular issue. i rarely report from the inside-out. >> what they're doing is no different? the guy that flew the jie ro copter to the capital, i( ñ he d just delivered 35 letters saying we ought to fix finance reform, that wouldn't have hit the abc news that night. everybody needs stunts. one thing that's interesting is communication staffing in congress there's a political scientist at the university of maryland, francis lee, i think, lee frances or frances lee, i can never remember. but she's tracked the change in how many congressional staffers' primary mission is messaging and communications as opposed to legislating or -- it'sñxcx remarkable. i'll bet the change is bigger there than it is at the white house. >> i guess i don't have as big a problem with the press dealing with press folks. i think if they're empowered it really depends particularly in the white house on how the top staff, senior advisers, communications director, the press secretary depending on who it is decides to empower people who are on their staff there's instances where those folks are given a tremendous amount of leeway to share information. they're in the meetings. they understand what's going on. it's worth talking to them. and there's times when it's not worth talking to them at all because they know nothing, if they do, they're not going to tell you because they're afraid of their own shadow. they're notd empowered in any meaningful way, so they're not really useful in that sense. i think -- and the same goes for the hill. you know, there are some press folks who -- in fact i'll give you an example in the white house, ben rhodes, his official title is strategic something communications director for the nsa. that belies the fact that he's probably the closest foreign policy adviser and longest standing foreign policy adviser that the president has. if there's something to be known he probably knows it. >> i don't mean to disparage people, but the good ones are great. they're knowledgeable and in the meetings. they shouldn't shield us from others as well. that's what i mean increasingly a=÷ sense that they're just there to block people from talking to us as opposed to them having information to talk to and them being facilitatorfacilitators. a lot of times you'll call a senior official who's not on the press staff and get a call back from the press staff, which is always -- that's a designed system. and i'm sure there are stars handed out to whatever senior folk do that. >> the agencies too. >> yeah, the agencies in general. >> there was some chuckles, i think, this week when the president burned a whole lot of jet fuel and generated a lot of carbon to fly down to the everglades to celebrate earth day and talk about it. but the fact of the matter is the backdrop of the everglades got that story in every newspaper with the photograph of him on the walkway over the swamp. that's how you get your message out. >> also, you can go to the events they put on. but you don't have to see what they want you to see. i think josh made the point earlier, when they're changing the lexicon within the white house, it's reflective of changing policy or viewpoints. and those are things that are hard to hide if you're paying close attention. >> to your question about the tension between letting them set the agenda and setting your own agenda, there's a story they want us to write every single day. i mean, we all will get e-mails 6:00, 7:00, 8:00 p.m. with some embargoed thing and we're all supposed to get super excited and pop out these thousand-word progress report on nothing. basically. and, you know, i think one unique position is we really do have to cover everything. because even if their progress report on the audio industry is really not that interesting to most of our readers, you know, the detroit free press is a member and people in michigan do want to read about that stuff. but i think we have conversations throughout the day, you know, every single day about how much does this merit? this thing they're trying to make a big deal out of, can we just, you know, do a little blurb on that, kind of dispense @r(t&háhp &hc%s on what weá really think is important today. and vice versa. what about that thing they kind of mentioned and tried to brush under the rug, no, that's actually the news today. we're going to make a big deal out of that and we're going to kind of briefly dispense with this thing that they're trying to focus on. we have to do both. >> it's their way trying to make something big is happening. generally big news they would not give to anybody ondk embargoes. >> i confess i'd only saw a lit the summary of the story. so maybe i'm not entirely sure if the whole story carried the theme. but the suggestion seemed to be they were using fact sheets as a more question. >> i guess my question is on covering the white house, d.c. as a whole, for those people who maybe don't have the clout of "new york times" or abc or a bigger known organization, how do you navigate reporting on the white house? or reporting in d.c.? and on top of that, how do you then cultivate these sources that you're saying many of the sources come to you not necessarily because the quality of their reporting but because of the audience and the viewership that you bring with you. >> well, i started on the beat with politico. which is not a small news organization, but it's not "the wall street journal" or abc, and i was alsocv iç very low level their team of, god, it was like ten, i think, at that time. and i made it my job to be there every single day. and do every little scrap of a trip that nobody wanted to do. and, you know, be trying to stick my head over the pack. and just get in the mix. as much as i could. and talk to as many people as i could. and i, you know, didn't have a family or anything so i spent a lot of time not at home and out and meeting people. just getting sourced up. and then you develop relationships in that way. then when you're three or four years covering it or a year into it or six months, someone's willing to talk to you not because you work for this flashy news organization they want to engage but because you've been around and they know you and so they talk to you. i mean, the other way is to find a story that you want to do and -- o a topic that you really like. and just get in there and pitch stories. and that's how you get in front of people who are behind the press operation. that's how you get into their offices typically if you're not lo working for a big news organization. and also just sitting back and noticing stuff. you know, the president when i was on the lower level of the white house team, you know, there was obviously the senior people were going to be doing the big story of the day. and that was not left to me. and so i would do things like, oh, the president is giving a six-minute speech on abraham lincoln, which is his favorite president and it's at the capitol and he had to bring his tell prompter and he took it everywhere he went. but that's something that the folks who were writing the story of the day necessarily weren't keeping an eye out for. and then you start -- when you start writing stories that get noticed, the white house folks e realize they need to deal with you and talk to you. and it builds on from there. >> also the news world notices who is leading on the story, who's on the cutting edge of the story. i'm looking around this room and i'm seeing a lot of people who work for organizations that aren't as big as my colleague's here, but their leaders are experts. so the white house eventually decides it has to deal with those people on that subject matter. and then it doesn't matter how big they are. if you know what you're talking about, if you really are the person who knows the most, people will talk to you. >> i think step one is acknowledging that there are certain limitations when you don't -- jim talked before about sort of the cachet that some of the news organizations we represent have. before i was in this job i worked for the hill, which is at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of news organizations in this town. and, you know, the only way to really make any headway at that level, i think, is to be smarter than the people who are too rushed with their daily deadlines covering the beat to be able to do the, you know, connect the dots, here's three things obama is doing. hold on, there's some overlap there. so it's enterprise. it's not going to be an announcement that because frankly, you know, a lot of what we do -- a lot of the news that comes out of the white house is choreographed. they're not going to choreograph it to give it to a small news outlet unless it's a really specific, you know, niche issue. so you have to sort of show your analytical skills and ability to provide context and office for readers, you know, gives you the ability to do a compelling story despite that lack of access that some of the large news organizations have. and then as carol was saying from there it kind of builds on itself. people start noticing, well, gosh, that person at that little outlet is doing this great stuff. we should talk with him about this. he probably would, you know, have a really interesting take on that. or she seems to really get the intricacies of this issue. it just starts to build. >> let me just say one more thing about how you get from the small place to a big place. be patient a little bit. it's not bad. i covered chicago city hall. that's where i learned how to be a political reporter. and it was amazing. i covered, you know, jayne burn, gerald washington, rich daly. i covered grab-you-by-the-lapels politics. go do that. you know, when you -- the first thing i would recommend just talking to you students is not go to the white house tomorrow and start writing small stories and trying to get in. go, you know, to springfield, illinois. go to some big city, even a small city, and cover the city council meetings. you know, you'll learn when people are lying to you. you'll learn who to trust. you'll learn how to make sources. those are all tools that are not natural and have to be learned. so i guess my advice is go some place small. >> i should say i started out that way too. i think most of us probably did. in florida i was covering, you know, the annual fireworks story or whatever. >> there's something to be said for making a lot of mistakes, which you will do on a stage it's a little smaller than the white house. >> i would come back i agree with everything everybody said up here and add one more thing. the best stories that you'll get, the stories that i feel best about never the ones the white house gave me. never. and they don't give us nearly as many stories as everybody assumes they give us. particularly mythology -- >> yeah. >> we'd like an audit of that. >> this is "the wall street journal" gave us. the interviews that are the best are not the ones they gave us. they're just not. i don't remember one that broke big news. the stories that are big are the ones you develop yourself. usually it's coming from the outside in because you have a good ear, because you are paying attention, because you are working from the ground up. those are the best stories. not the things they give out. so don't worry about stuff like that because it's not important. >> and with that i think we've run out of time. i want to say thank you to you guys for your great questions and let's thank our panel. [ applause ] tonight on american history tv, american artifacts. starting at 8:00 p.m. republican senator lamar alexander recalls his walk across tennessee as part of his successful 1978 gubernatorial campaign, and shares the stories behind political momentos in his washington, d.c. senate office. at 8:30 p.m. a reconstructed black smith forge on wheels built over the course of two years using 1860