White House whitewashers

Bush staffers chastise NBC for a Clinton interview, Fleischer whacks Maher and the Bush-was-in-danger story falls apart. Tension mounts between the White House and the media.

By Jake Tapper

Sept. 27, 2001 | WASHINGTON -- On the same day last week that "NBC Nightly News" anchor Tom Brokaw sat down to interview former President Clinton, executives for the program received unexpected phone calls from senior communications staffers at the White House, expressing disappointment about the decision to spotlight Bush's predecessor.

While not asking the network to refrain from running the interview, they expressed the feeling that the Sept. 18 interview with Clinton would not be helpful to the current war on terrorism. Neither NBC nor the White House would comment on the phone calls, but sources familiar with the calls confirmed that they happened.

This news comes on the heels of revelations that President Bush and Air Force One were not, contrary to earlier White House claims, targets of the terrorists who attacked the Pentagon and the World Trade Center Sept. 11. The White House is now saying that those claims, which it used to explain why the president didn't return to Washington immediately that day, were a result of staffers "misunderstanding" security information.

On Wednesday, tensions between the White House and its media critics, real or imagined, threatened to rise even higher. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer took a slap at "Politically Incorrect" host Bill Maher, who called U.S. military strikes on faraway targets "cowardly." Fleischer blasted Maher, claiming it was "a terrible thing to say," and didn't stop there, noting "There are reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do, and this is not a time for remarks like that; there never is."

On the face of it, these moves by the Bush administration to discourage media criticism don't seem to make much sense. By the time of the Clinton interview, for instance, polls were showing unprecedented public support for Bush, which has since only increased. And at the time, all Clinton had to say about Bush was that he supported him, and urged the rest of the country to do the same.

But this White House has developed a particularly tense, mutually distrustful relationship with members of the news media, one that has only seemed to deepen since the Sept. 11 attacks. This relationship seems to be focused specifically on the White House's political and communication staffs (it's virtually impossible to imagine Bush knowing anything about the calls to NBC). And it embodies what many members of the media -- conservative, liberal and nonpartisan -- decry as an arrogant, unnecessarily adversarial attitude, one where questions about White House decisions are regarded as inappropriate and, now, quite possibly unpatriotic.

And the relationship has been particularly hampered by these White House staffers' well-publicized difficulty telling the truth.

Next page: A history of bending the truth