BOB GARFIELD: The Bush administration's tightness of lips, we know by now, is hardly confined to its handling of terrorism detainees. Since day one its attitude towards the press has been distrustful at best, and often characterized by outright disdain. President Bush has had but 11 solo press conferences -- fewer than any president since the advent of television. His administration's message discipline is almost airtight, and bruising though it may be to the institutional ego of the news industry, this administration seems actually indifferent to the vaunted White House press corps. So concludes New Yorker magazine media writer Ken Auletta in a piece titled "Fortress Bush," and he joins me now. Ken, welcome back to OTM.

KEN AULETTA: Thank you. Good to be here.

BOB GARFIELD:There was a striking remark in your piece by Andrew Card, the president's chief of staff, who said that he doesn't believe that the press is a check and balance on the administration, and he has no responsibility to serve it. But correct me if I'm wrong here, but wasn't the Fourth Estate, the free press, envisioned by the framers to in fact be a check and a balance on the excesses of a government, or at least on the people's representative before the government?

KEN AULETTA:Oh, no question. I mean if you read Madison's Federalist Paper No. 10 it talks about factions, and in order to counter the factions, they talk about the need for checks and balances, three divisions of government and a free press. And implicit in the First Amendment is the notion that we do perform in the press a check and balance function. And for the chief of staff to the president of the United States to deny that we perform that function is, I think, a misreading of history and also very dangerous.

BOB GARFIELD:I want to talk to you just briefly about the feedback loop and how a single story can influence not only other reporting but also the White House's reaction which of course influences the message of the day. Let's listen to a piece of tape from a White House press conference. [CLIP FROM WHITE HOUSE PRESS CONFERENCE PLAYS]

REPORTER: Mr. President, in light of the, the New York Times editorial today, tell me why--

GEORGE W. BUSH: Let me stop you, Wendell, I don't read those editorials, [LAUGHTER] so you're going to have to-- maybe you ought to ask the question not in that context but in another context.

BOB GARFIELD: The president doesn't read the editorials?

KEN AULETTA: He says he gets his information from his staff which he says is an independent force, and I begin my piece in the New Yorker with an anecdote of -- at a Texas barbecue last year, reporters asked him, "Mr. President, is it true you really don't read newspapers or watch the press?" And he says "Yes." And, and they said "Well then how do you then know what the American people are thinking?" a reporter said to him; he said "You know, you're making a very powerful assumption here that you, the press, represent what the American people think. I don't believe that." And he doesn't.

BOB GARFIELD:All right now you've quoted your opening anecdote in the piece. Let me skip down to your parting shot, because it, it's the question that you're raising that I think is the most stunning of all, and that is the notion that the White House press corps is increasingly irrelevant. They just aren't the players that they used to be. Has this administration figured something out that will inform how all future White Houses deal with the national press?

KEN AULETTA:I don't know whether they've figured it out, but they believe that. But it used to be that you would have a single news cycle every day, and so you'd go out there as a reporter and you'd figure out what your story is, and you'd file it. Today, you call in to your news desk at noon, and you tell your editor "I think this is the story I'll work on for 6 o'clock tonight or for tomorrow morning," and your editor says "Don't work on that story. I already saw it on the web, or I already saw it on Fox News or CNN or MSNBC. I need another story." And then when you call in at 4 o'clock, the same thing happens. That is inevitably going to weaken the power of the traditional media. But also, increasingly, the best and the brightest say "I don't want to be a stenographer." John King, who's a great political reporter, he's with CNN, John King told me that he has very little time to report, 'cause he has to go out 20 times a day to stand on the White House lawn to update every half hour, every hour, his news reports for CNN. It doesn't leave you a lot of time to report. It's made even harder when the people you call to report don't return your phone calls in the Bush administration. A lot of ambitious reporters say this is not fun. This is not what I really want to do in my career. I want to go out and report things.

BOB GARFIELD:There's a tendency to look at how this administration deals with the press and vice versa, comparing it to previous administrations, but what about the relationship between the White House and the press vis-a-vis American society's view of the press. Is the Bush administration working in an environment that simply just makes it easier for them to treat all of us like dirt?

KEN AULETTA:Oh, absolutely. I mean next to used car salesmen and people who spam you on the internet, the press is pretty unpopular. And so it is easier to get away with that. I mean if you remember Spiro Agnew in the Nixon administration would attack, you know, "negative nabobs of-- nattering nabobs of negativism" he called them, and he attacked the press as elitist. And that resonated with a segment of the population, but not a majority of the population. Today, attacks on the press resonate with a much larger number of the population, and you could say that some of that's unjustified. But the truth of the matter is that one of the reasons the press is held in such low regard and one of the reasons that Bush can ignore us is because of our own behavior, and it's too easy for us to just criticize Bush and say "Well he hates us," or Clinton or whoever, without looking at our own behavior. And I think, hopefully, we will, and we should.

BOB GARFIELD: All right. Well, Ken, thanks very much.

KEN AULETTA: My pleasure.

BOB GARFIELD:Ken Auletta's article, "Fortress Bush," appears in the current issue of the New Yorker magazine. His new book, Back Story: Inside the Business of News, is published by Penguin Press. [MUSIC]

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