D.C. Dispatch March 15, 2005

The hubbub over a blogger getting inside the White House briefing room shows that the blogging story has become a cottage industry—a cultural fashion trend.

Sleeping With the Enemy

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Media puzzle of the week: Why was the world blown away that a blogger got inside the White House briefing room?

Just 24 hours after Garrett M. Graff, editor of FishBowl DC, witnessed his first live White House press briefing, Google News was counting 183 blogger-makes-history stories from media Web sites around the world. The Times of London was especially awed: "AN UNASSUMING 23-year-old outsider yesterday took one small step for a blogger, one giant leap for the blogosphere, as he became the first recognised Internet diarist to be welcomed into the White House."

The New York Times called it "another signal moment for bloggers," while over at HardwareGeeks.com ("a community for sophisticated geeks and geekettes"), they were flying the victory flag: "A blogger with a White House Press pass? Just another sign of the times and another indication that bloggers are as powerful as regular media."

I'm not here to diminish Graff's exercise, which was in fact a very nice bit of entrepreneurial journalism. By his own account, he was just trying to replicate what mystery man/alleged gigolo Jeff Gannon/James Guckert famously did, penetrating the White House with what's known as a daily pass. Graff ran into a little resistance at first, and wrote about it on his blog. Then the likes of USA Today and CNN started looking into his plight, and the portals of the press room magically opened to him. Mainstream media to the rescue! It was the clearest evidence yet that the old establishment and the blogs are developing a truly symbiotic relationship.

But was this really a "signal moment," a symbol of blogs' new relevance and power, as mainstream and blogosphere alike would have you believe?

Well, here's what the first blogger on the White House beat (if you don't count White House reporters who also blog on the side) wrote in the first paragraph of his very first entry: "All in all, it's been a remarkably uneventful morning—which, we're told, is what most mornings are like at the White House."

Most afternoons, too. I've never met Graff, but I like him all the more for telling it straight and not twisting his day into the made-for-Hollywood sensation—Power Blogger Takes Over—that the larger media world wanted it to be. The White House is a powerful place—for presidents and their staffs. For the media, it's something else: a weird little drama club, where we send some of our best people to perform in a sort of pantomime journalism show that's often embarrassing.

First, there's the problem of newslessness. Thanks to C-SPAN, White House briefings effectively happen in front of the whole country—so not much news to break there. This has been true for a long time, but it's gotten worse under the Bush administration, which openly scorns the media and is setting new records for stinginess when it comes to news and information. Off-screen sessions between the president's spokesman and reporters (aka "The Gaggle") are not exactly what you'd call a fount of earth-shaking revelations, either.

The other absurd element of the briefing room is the human one. In addition to the regular journalists—the bylines, faces, and voices that news consumers encounter on a regular basis—there's always been a supporting cast of odd demi-journalists: obsessives, cranks, and media groupies who are drawn to the White House for their own very personal reasons. Sometimes, the briefing room could pass for the set of a Fellini movie. At least one longtime "correspondent" is known to have bunked there for extended periods in classic bag-lady style. In the '80s and '90s, actress June Lockhart—Maureen Robinson on Lost in Space—was a habitue.

You get the picture. As the briefings have grown hollow under President Bush, and the mainstreamers have drifted away, the Fellini people have moved to the fore—literally. "The wingnuts now get in the second or third row," one establishment reporter told me.

What was really ridiculous about this week's Blogger-Gets-In stories was their failure to acknowledge just how easy it is to get into the briefing room, and how many people from outside the mainstream—way outside—were already there before the blogger arrived. This is not a secret, after all. For years, the mainstream media themselves have mocked the whole scene. As Dan Froomkin, author of The Washington Post's online column, White House Briefing, wrote recently: "As the case of Jim Guckert, aka Jeff Gannon, has amply demonstrated, the bar for getting into the White House briefing room is pretty low. But the fact of the matter is that the White House press office and the press corps have a long tradition of tolerance when it comes to eccentrics in their midst. The current crop includes Lester Kinsolving, Raghubir Goyal, Connie Lawn, and Russel Mokhiber—each wondrously special in their own way."

So why was there so much breathlessness about a blogger joining this emphatically non-exclusive club? Because the blogging story has become a cottage industry, a cultural fashion trend that blogger and establishment alike have a vested interest in keeping alive. Graff did a good thing, a fun thing, but I wonder about the overhyping of it by so many others, the conspiracy of enthusiasm that unites the blogs and their chief publicity agent, the mainstream.

Is the glorious, fulminating outsider becoming a sniveling, badge-wearing insider, just another seeker of cheap buzz?

Hope not.

William Powers is a columnist for National Journal, a weekly magazine covering politics and government published in Washington, D.C.