BOB GARFIELD: This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: And I'm Brooke Gladstone. If you want to get the latest on President Bush's schedule, you might find that you're better off scanning the pages of the foreign press than consulting the White House press corps. Guatemalan President Oscar Berger was two weeks ahead of the White House in announcing his upcoming visit to Washington. It was the Palestinian Authority, and not the Bush administration, that first tipped the media off about then-Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas's July visit to the White House. Washington Post scribe Dana Milbank says that reporters learned long ago that the best source on presidential events is often found anywhere but the White House.

DANA MILBANK: Olivia Knox, who covers the White House for AFP, did a little takeoff on the common White House phrase they like to say: When we have something to announce, we'll announce it. But Olivia said a better phrase would be: When we have something to announce, a foreign government will announce it. [LAUGHTER] So this has happened in Ireland with the president's upcoming visit to Shannon. It happened at the president's visit to Tokyo last fall. This happens on domestic trips as well. We find them out more likely through local newspapers, hearing it from Republican officials, rather than the White House. For example, the president's recent trip to Des Moines, Iowa came to us via the Des Moines Register. His trip this week to Pittsburgh first surfaced in a column by Bob Novak. [LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:What is it about scheduling that the White House really doesn't want guys like you to know? I mean the same thing happened again when British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited last week. The American press corps heard about it from British officials.

DANA MILBANK: Obviously there are times when the White House does not want to broadcast the president's schedule too much in advance. They don't want to give bad guys a chance to target him. In other cases, for example, I, I pointed out that a, a little league team from Orlando was coming to the White House, and the White House officials were refusing to confirm this. And it's hard to imagine, even if they were using aluminum bats, that this would have been a major threat to the White House. So, it's become a bit of a running joke. In fact, Scott McLellan, the White House press secretary, he rushed into the morning briefing which he did aboard Air Force One to announce when the visit of Jordan's King Abdullah had been rescheduled for--it had been canceled this week--and he said he did that quickly so that the Jordanians could not beat him to it.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:If the Bush administration goes out of its way not to confirm, even when confronted with visits by foreign dignitaries, visits by our ambassadors to other nations -- the fact that we can't even learn that kind of thing from the White House -- what does that suggest to you?

DANA MILBANK: Well, it's part of the ethos. It's, it's symbolic. The administration -- any administration -- starts with a monopoly of information. They have all the power that way. This administration has done much better than others at hoarding that power, and what they have found, in small areas like whether the president's trip to Des Moines gets announced by the Des Moines Register or whether accounts of internal meetings in the White House get written about in books by Paul O'Neill and his fellow writer or by Dick Clarke, the information ultimately gets out anyway. The lesson, I think, that it would be nice for the, the Bush White House to glean from this is that it might as well be more forthcoming with information in the first place. There's obviously a good public service case to be made for having information sooner rather than later.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dana, thanks very much.

DANA MILBANK: Thank you, Brooke.

BROOKE GLADSTONE: Dana Milbank covers the White House for the Washington Post.