Watch Rumsfeld Get Schooled and White House Press Corps
This makes me wonder. Doesn’t the White House press get invited to events and thus the government can allow and disallow certain press? This to me seems like it should be democratized and regulated outside the control of the White House. Ideally, the white house press corps is very powerful and has certain credentials for being able to ask questions. Do they not do a very bad job as the first line of extracting information from government officials?
Does anyone know how to get in touch with the white houses’ press corps? I just went to whitehouse.gov and called the switchboard to find the press contacts. How can just anyone get into the press corps? Is it based upon money, rank of news organization, etc?
I have a feeling that this is very controlled by the white house and if so, how can we break this open so that we can get some real information, questioning and logging of information. If you are interested in this, please contact http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/.
BTW, I just called the white house switchboard and they took down my name, number and publication (which I always use the SCALE journal because it has legitimate ISBN number with Library of Congress). I wonder if I will get put on a list now? I just received a return phone call by what the switchboard operator called the “duty press.” I picked up the phone and discussed with someone about this and will talk about it monday or tuesday of next week (as I realized it is Sunday afternoon and I probably interrupted someone’s relax time).
My girlfriend looked at me like I did something crazy, but I realized yet again this is the same approach I would use in Open Source. Basically, I wanted information, so I directly went to find it. Thus, hopefully, I will map out this space a little more and bring attention to it.
In the meantime please check out the white house press corpse article. Oh, and it looks like the information space on the White House Press Corps is pretty limited.
What I would like is something similar to metavid but for all parts of press events in government so that we can bypass the intermediaries (current press) and get our questions directly answered. Also, this is an attempt to lessen the power of the white house in hopes of democratizing and cracking open how we get media.
