FORTRESS BUSH.(relations between the media and President Bush)

Last August, in Crawford, Texas, George W. Bush gave a barbecue for the press corps. Bush has let it be known that he's not much of a television-news watcher or a newspaper reader, apart from the sports section; and during a conversation with reporters he explained, perhaps without intending to, why his White House often seems indifferent to the press. "How do you then know what the public thinks?" a reporter asked, according to Bush aides and reporters who heard the exchange. And Bush replied, "You're making a huge assumption--that you represent what the public thinks."

At the White House, I recently heard much the same thing--it sounded like a declaration of press irrelevance--from Andrew Card, Bush's chief of staff, who said of the press, "They don't represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election. . . . I don't believe you have a check-and-balance function."

Bush's relations with the press are, at once, distant, friendly, and prickly. Many reporters like Bush personally; he gives some of them nicknames (he calls David Gregory, of NBC, "Stretch," and Bill Sammon, of the Washington Times, "Super Stretch"); and, especially during the 2000 campaign, reporters felt comfortable around the jocular candidate. Yet Bush, like many conservatives, also believes that the press is dominated by left-leaning men and women, and that their biases affect their reporting. And, more than any President in recent memory, Bush is uneasy in the spotlight--especially in front of television cameras. When he lacks a prepared script, that discomfort creates a kind of tension that has nothing to do with ideology or personal rapport.

But what the White House insists is most troublesome about the press is its perceived hunger for headlines, which leads, in turn, to carelessness. Mark McKinnon, the director of advertising for Bush's 2000 Presidential campaign and now for his reelection, says, "I've never subscribed to the bias argument about the press. I think the press is tough on everybody. The nature of the news business is that conflict is news."

I heard similar interpretations throughout the White House. Karl Rove, the President's closest political adviser, says of Bush, "He has a cagey respect for them"--the press. "He understands their job is to do a job. And that's not necessarily to report the news. It's to get a headline or get a story that will make people pay attention to their magazine, newspaper, or television more."

According to Rove, who works out of a modest second-floor office at an antique wood desk piled high with papers, Bush sees the press as "elitist" and thinks that the social and economic backgrounds of most reporters have nothing in common with those of most Americans. Bush refers to the major newsweeklies--Newsweek, Time, and U.S. News & World Report--as "the slicks." Reporters, for their part, see the White House as a fortress. In December of 2002, Bob Deans, who was then the president of the White House Correspondents Association, sent a two-page letter to Andrew Card. He summed up the recent news--Bush had announced a plan to protect the public from smallpox; the Senate Majority Leader, Trent Lott, was embroiled in a racial controversy--yet noted that Bush had "not taken a single question" from the White House press in two weeks and had held "substantially fewer press conferences, interviews," and other media events than either Bill Clinton or George H. W. Bush in their first two years. Deans never received a reply.

Bush's view of the press is also personal, and was no doubt shaped by the experience of his father, who sometimes invited reporters to chat or to toss horseshoes, often over the objections of his wife. A former close aide remembers that Barbara Bush, who is similar in temperament to her son, would never speak off the record to reporters, because she believed they would betray her confidence. "She didn't trust these people," the former aide recalls.