by Sean Spicer
On my first day, I wanted to make a statement and take back some control of the briefing room that had been ceded by previous administrations to an admiring press.
Tradition had it that after a press secretary made a short statement, the first question would always come from the AP White House beat reporter, then Julie Pace. The press secretary would usually turn deferentially to the mainstream media giants of the first row—ABC, NBC, CBS, the Washington Post, the New York Times, Reuters, and the AP, which were, in short, the major networks, papers, and wire services—and then work back to where reporters from the smaller or niche media outlets dwelled. In some ways, the AP reporter was in charge because by tradition it was up to that reporter to decide when to end the press briefing by saying, “Thank you very much.”
I threw this protocol out the window in four ways.
First, I gave the first question to Daniel Halper of the New York Post. We wanted to send a signal that this was a Trump presidency, and giving the first question to a New York paper clearly conveyed that. It also made it clear that the days of the establishment media dominating the briefing were over.
Second, I looked beyond the media giants to regional papers, business media, ethnic media, and other outlets. I did so not out of spite but out of the recognition that even the largest media outlets were being marginalized by social media and media fragmentation. Other reporters also had a right to question the White House press secretary.
Third, when Julie Pace, the AP reporter on duty that first Monday, said, “Thank you very much” about forty-five minutes into the briefing, which traditionally should have signaled the end, I looked down and said, “Thank you. I’m going to keep going.” This wasn’t an attempt to slight Julie but rather another small gesture to signal that the press was not in charge of the briefing, we were.
Fourth, I announced that we would have four “Skype seats” reserved for journalists who worked outside the Washington beltway. In a digital age, it made sense to use technology to widen access to the White House. There was also a deeper point to this move—the White House Correspondents’ Association and its members had become a comfortable guild separated from the media pack by nineteenth-century standards of proximity and access. There were too many print publications, online news sites, and radio and TV affiliates that were being left out.
The mainstream media hyperventilated about censorship and dangers to the First Amendment, which was ludicrous, as we were expanding access to the White House press briefing. What the major media outlets were really upset about was our recognition of reality—that the American media landscape extended far beyond three TV networks, a wire service, and a couple of major newspapers. Mainstream media is outraged by attacks on itself but never seems to find issue with launching attacks on conservative media. I guess it’s only an attack on the First Amendment when mainstream media is questioned. During the Obama administration, Fox News was ostracized by the president and his staff, and the ring leaders of the mainstream media didn’t seem to express the same concerns about the First Amendment.
I ultimately took question about everything from the high cost of prescription drugs to the coming order to permit the building of the Keystone pipeline. Then ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl, a journalist I had known for almost twenty years, asked a question that went to the heart of my credibility.
Karl: Before I get to a policy question, just a question about the nature of your job.
Spicer: Yeah.
Karl: Is it your intention to always tell the truth from that podium, and will you pledge never to knowingly say something that is not factual?
Spicer: It is. It’s an honor to do this, and, yes, I believe that we have to be honest with the American people. I think sometimes we can disagree with the facts. There are certain things that we may miss—we may not fully understand when we come out. But our intention’s never to lie to you, Jonathan. Our job is to make sure that sometimes—and you’re in the same boat—I mean, there are times when you guys tweet something out or write a story, and you publish a correction. That doesn’t mean that you were intentionally trying to deceive readers and the American people, does it? And I think we should be afforded the same opportunity. There are times when we believe something to be true, or we get something from an agency, or we act in haste because the information available wasn’t complete, but our desire [is] to communicate with the American people and make sure that you have the most complete story at the time. And so we do it.
This led to a discussion of the police-reported Washington Metro numbers I had issued in haste on Saturday. Those were the numbers I used because those were the numbers I had, and I defended my statement that Trump’s inauguration had been the “largest watched inaugural ever” with social media live streaming and television. This time, I was prepared to walk through the numbers in a more careful way.
In doing so, I wanted to rebut the press’s double standard. Almost all veteran reporters have filed stories that, in retrospect, they wished they had made clearer and provided more context for, or that they later realized were flat-out wrong. Yet rarely do reporters have their integrity questioned the way Jonathan questioned mine. In the previous administration, he had asked the press secretary if the administration would pledge to tell the truth, but now he was making it very personal.
And, of course, he was not alone. The January 11 press conference was the start of a new era for CNN’s Jim Acosta. That day, he took on the role of carnival barker, yelling at the president-elect and grandstanding for the camera. He was joining with Jonathan to try to portray me as a liar.
Standing at the podium can be a game of gotcha—having to remember every detail of policy proposals ranging from trade deals to healthcare reform, to immigration, to national security, to tax reform and beyond (not to mention the specifics from various meetings, the names of every domestic and foreign leader, and the proper pronunciation of those names). Some reporters ask questions at the briefings to get information to write strong stories; other reporters try to throw curveball questions at the press secretary, in hopes of knocking him or her off balance and creating a moment that can go viral.
With so much to convey, it was inevitable that mistakes would happen. But I did promise that if we ever issued an inaccurate statement, we would correct the record.
I again called out Zeke Miller for his “racially charged” tweet that the president had removed the bust of Martin Luther King Jr. from the Oval Office. I noted that Miller had tweeted out an apology to “my colleagues.” Where was his apology to the president? Or to the White House staff who had to respond to his false report? Or to the American people who had been misled by it? I thought the fact that he had only apologized to his colleagues showed just how clubby and insular the White House press had become and how so much of what they did was to impress each other rather than to accurately inform the American people.
I stood my ground and answered questions for almost two hours.
When I left the podium, I was mentally exhausted but thinking I had righted the ship. I wanted to sit down, but there was one more thing I needed to do. I almost sprinted to the Oval Office and the president’s back dining room. This was it—was I back or not? The television at the end of the room was on, and President Trump was leaning back in his chair at the end of the table, remote in hand, and beaming. To my eternal surprise, he rose up and gave me a bear hug.
“That’s my Sean. Good job,” he said. “Right way to do it.”
I had found my footing—many friends told me approvingly after the press briefing, “That’s the Sean Spicer I know”—but I still faced a media that reported rumor as fact and put stories about alleged, White House palace intrigue ahead of substantive reporting about policy.
I got a taste of this before I had even left the RNC. Just before Christmas 2016, the RNC put out a statement: “Over two millennia ago, a new hope was born into the world, a Savior who would offer the promise of salvation to all mankind. Just as the three
wise men did on that night, this Christmas heralds a time to celebrate the good news of a new King. We hope Americans celebrating Christmas today will enjoy a day of festivities and a renewed closeness with family and friends.”
The big tent of the RNC includes people from just about every religion. We routinely issued religious tidings, extending our best wishes to Jewish Americans at Passover, to Muslim Americans at Ramadan, and so on.
And yet, this time heads exploded on social media and cable news.
Jonathan Chait, a writer for New York magazine, tweeted: “The distinction between a president and a king is not trivial.”
MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin said, “No joke—This line is actually in the RNC’s Christmas message.”4
“I hope you are kidding,” I replied when asked by BuzzFeed about whether Donald Trump was the “King” in question. “Christ is the King in the Christian faith,” I replied. “To ask this on Christmas is frankly offensive.” Ben Smith, BuzzFeed editor in chief and a veteran of Politico, took to Twitter to stand by BuzzFeed’s “reporting.”
Over the years, I have experienced many spats with reporters and media outlets, but this disagreement at Christmastime was a new low.
This was just the beginning of a landslide of negative media coverage. Over a three-month period in the following year, the conservative Media Research Center found that coverage of President Trump was 91 percent negative.5 In an analysis of the media coverage of Trump’s first one hundred days as president, a paper from the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School noted, “Trump has received unsparing coverage for most weeks of his presidency, without a single major topic where Trump’s coverage, on balance, was more positive than negative, setting a new standard for unfavorable press coverage of a president.” It went on:
Trump’s coverage during his first 100 days set a new standard for negativity. Of news reports with a clear tone, negative reports outpaced positive ones by 80 percent to 20 percent. Trump’s coverage was unsparing. In no week did the coverage drop below 70 percent negative and it reached 90 percent negative at its peak . . . .The best period for Trump was week 12 of his presidency, when he ordered a cruise missile strike on a Syrian airbase in retaliation for the Assad regime’s use of nerve gas on civilians. That week, his coverage divided 70 percent negative to 30 percent positive. Trump’s worst periods were weeks 3 and 4 (a combined 87 percent negative) when federal judges struck down his first executive order banning Muslim immigrants, and weeks 9 and 10 (a combined 88 percent negative) when the House of Representatives was struggling without success to muster the votes to pass a “repeal and replace” health care bill. . . .
CNN and NBC’s coverage was the most unrelenting—negative stories about Trump outpaced positive ones by 13-to-1 on the two networks.6
There are reportedly three big Trump rules: 1) when you are right, you fight, 2) never apologize, and 3) controversy elevates the message. When Donald Trump lashes out on Twitter, it is to express his message without distortion, told in his own words, not left up to interpretation or spin. He believes that if you get hit, you hit back twice as hard. I don’t always agree with that strategy, but Trump usually makes it work. I think the president sometimes calls attention to attacks from marginal people that would be better left alone, but I understand his frustration. Americans may not always agree with what he says, or how he says it, but many people understand why he’s frustrated.
Donald Trump came to office determined to disrupt the status quo at all levels. From the get-go, I tried to channel that spirit into the way we interacted with the White House press corps.
The leaders of the White House Correspondents’ Association had already briefed me on the traditional protocols of White House press briefings, and I had questioned whether these old practices were best practices. The more I probed, the more defensive their body language became.
They could see changes coming, and they didn’t like it.
I wanted to expand access to the briefing without taking up prime real estate in the West Wing. I considered moving our briefings to a recently renovated space on the ground floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, right across West Executive Avenue Northwest from the West Wing and “Pebble Beach” where television reporters do their live reports from the North Lawn of the White House. The space we identified was significantly larger than the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room—it could accommodate many more journalists and bloggers. Of course, I realized this move would have created the mother of all media backlashes, not because it was a bad idea but because the major news outlets would scream that they had been banished from the White House. They would also fret about their prestige taking a hit as more reporters got to attend. But more reporters meant more sources of information for the American people. Jeff Mason of Reuters, then the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, had told me there would be initial interest in the briefings and they would be carried on camera for a few weeks, maybe a month or two, but then interest would subside. As the calendar flipped from February to March, and the briefings became “must-see TV,” attracting millions of daily viewers, I would gently remind him of that prediction.
With so much going on during the transition and in the early days of the administration, my idea to move the daily briefing wasn’t a top priority for Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway, or Steve Bannon. And without their full backing, I figured I wouldn’t and couldn’t do it.
The current briefing room has forty-nine seats and standing room for others. My proposal would have opened that capacity up to about 250 reporters. I think most people would consider that a good thing, but the establishment media likes the current situation because it protects them. There are seats for all the big, mainstream outlets, and they control the White House Correspondents’ Association, the organization that has assigned the seats for decades, deciding which network, newspaper, or other outlet gets which of the forty-nine seats. Most of the regular reporters who cover the White House have access to small, work-space areas, located in the back of the Press Briefing Room. But for years, that area has been cramped and uncomfortable—plus it hasn’t been made available to newer news organizations. So, while a larger room and more workspace might have been good for journalism in general, the mainstream media folks already had what they needed and weren’t concerned with “up-and-coming” media outlets.
The changes I did make were enough to send the White House Correspondents’ guild into orbit.
Ben Schreckinger of Politico warned the republic about the dangers of Skype: “[T]he Trump team has gotten to work quickly, stacking its briefings in its favor. In its first week in the White House, Trump’s communications team installed screens in the briefing room to allow journalists outside Washington—including conservative talk radio hosts—to participate [in them].” Perhaps those screens hadn’t been used in eight years, but I remember when those screens were inserted a decade ago by the George W. Bush administration. Beyond Ben lacking the facts about the screens, he also didn’t accurately note that the majority of journalists who attended the briefings via Skype were reporters for local affiliates of major networks. When USA Today did a story on my use of Skype to give access to more reporters, it noted that the issues raised by these outside reporters differed drastically from the questions asked by the White House press corps. That was the point. The D.C. press corps has a pack mentality, asking the same questions about the same subjects over and over—especially if they needed their own “cutaway shot” to include in their coverage—whereas the reporters on Skype generally asked about issues important to their communities. USA Today tabulated that the top five issues raised by the Washington press corps were, in order, intelligence and wiretapping, the continuing Russia controversy, health care, communications issues and the president’s tweets, and immigration. The top five issues for reporters who participated via Skype were, in order, immigration, taxes, coal and energy production, local issues, and infrastructure. In short, reporters who
attended through Skype were more interested in real news and policy than the D.C.-based reporters who were more interested in controversy. Trump had been elected by disenfranchised voters in the so-called “flyover states,” and it was important to include their questions and address issues important to them.
Bringing in remote reporters via Skype helped restore competition to the marketplace of ideas and journalism. I didn’t set out to settle scores or to clip wings. I set out to change the ossified rules of the White House press office and to bring in more diversity, including Spanish-language outlets and minority-owned American Urban Radio.
With Skype I was also able to bring in geographically and ideologically diverse voices. Consider Lars Larson, a radio personality in Oregon. In one interview, Lars asked me, “The federal government is the biggest landlord in America. It owns two-thirds of a billion acres of America. I don’t think the founders ever envisioned it that way. Does President Trump want to start returning the people’s land to the people? And in the meantime, for a second question—since that’s in fashion these days—can he tell the Forest Service to start logging our forests aggressively again to provide jobs for Americans, wealth for the Treasury, and not spend $3.5 billion a year fighting forest fires?”
Now, if you’re a White House correspondent, that’s a “wasted” question, time wasted in the briefing that could have been better spent on palace intrigue or any number of issues that have been covered ad nauseam. If you happen to live in the rural American West where about one-half of the land is owned and managed by Washington, D.C., it is a very important question.
In that same briefing, Kim Kalunian from WPRI in Rhode Island wanted to know if the president would retaliate against the city of Providence, Rhode Island, by withdrawing grant money because it had declared itself a “sanctuary city” in defiance of federal law.7