Dan Calabrese

Yesterday’s attempt by the White House to freeze Fox News White House correspondent Major Garrett out of a fairly routine, pool interview is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen in media relations. And I’ve seen a lot.

Freeze out.

I worked in public relations for 12 years. I’ve worked in and around journalism for 25 years. During that time, I’ve dealt with plenty of people who were mad at the news media. Sometimes they were my clients. Other times I’ve been the reporter, and the people have been mad at me.

One thing has been true in every situation: You have to deal with the media, even if they’re not entirely fair, and the worst thing you can do when they’ve got their eye on you is to try to shut them out, hoping that somehow they will just move on to something else.

I’ve experienced a few situations in which the people I was covering tried their best not to deal with me. The most egregious came about 15 years ago when I was working as a reporter for the Grand Rapids Business Journal, covering a community development story. The developers were represented by a rather uppity, establishment-type PR flack who was used to his clients getting lapdog-type coverage just because they were the establishment. When I didn’t handle the story in that manner, he called my editor demanding that another reporter be assigned to the story.

That was a mistake. It was recommended that he and I get on the phone and discuss the situation. I asked him what his problem was. Highly irritated, he began ranting about the relative unworthiness of the project’s critics compared to the community luminaries he represented. He made his point in some of the most arrogant language I’ve ever heard.

I took notes. I wrote a story. His most obnoxious quote was blown up in large type and plastered across the front page. He looked like an ass. I will make no bones about the fact that I did it to him intentionally.

Many other times, I’ve been working a story and the people I was covering didn’t really want to see my story published. They figured that if they didn’t return my calls or provide me with information, there would be no story.

This is an easy one.

“I’ll be filing my story about you at noon tomorrow,” the message begins. “Do you want to take the opportunity to provide me with accurate information and your comments, or should I just go with what I have from sources outside your organization?”

The phone will ring within an hour.

The White House hates Fox News. Understood. The White House would pretty much prefer if no story Fox News does ever makes it to air. We get it. Many presidents have felt the same way about many media outlets.

This, however, is the first White House where the media relations geniuses surrounding the president thought they could make a media outlet go away by essentially pretending it doesn’t exist.

Yesterday’s attempted freeze-out of Garrett – reversed when ABC, NBC, CBS and CNN, to their credit, refused to take part in the interview if Garrett was not included – was not only petty, it was guaranteed to be self-defeating. Anyone who knows even the slightest thing about media relations could see that.

The Obama Administration has a plethora of media outlets firmly in their camp, and basically one antagonist. Most presidents would kill for a situation like that. Obama’s approach is to obsess over the one. As such, he commits the one offense that might put the fawning coverage he enjoys from the rest of the media at risk.

Most of the media love liberalism, but there is one thing they love more – their own importance and independence. The administration launched a broadside against that independence on Sunday when, during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, David Axelrod not only declared Fox News not to be a news organization, he also instructed the rest of the media not to treat them like one.

Dude.

White House correspondents generally know and respect each other. They sit around at the White House all the time. Many of them are closer to their fellow correspondents from other media outlets than they are to their colleagues at their own. They simply spend more time together.

It should come as no surprise that ABC’s Jake Tapper lit into White House press secretary Robert Gibbs about having the gall to declare Fox “not a news organization.” Tapper works with Major Garrett every day. Tapper is a good correspondent who asks tough questions regardless of which party is in the White House. Tapper also understands if the White House can freeze out reporters who ask tough questions of the administration, he could be next.

So when the White House took this gambit to unbelievably ham-handed proportions on Thursday, and tried to exclude Garrett from an interview of marginal importance – just because he is from Fox and they don’t like Fox – it made perfect sense that even the Obama-friendly networks recoiled.

Any 22-year-old recent graduate of a college PR curriculum could tell you what a stupid move that was. And if the White House thinks its marginalization of Fox will prevent the other networks from following up on anti-Obama reporting that originates on Fox, they got the first taste on Thursday of what happens when they try to tell the other networks how to do their jobs.

That this is amateurish in the extreme hardly needs to be pointed out. But it’s all the more astounding that these people cannot get their brains around the idea that dealing with the media – friendly and unfriendly alike – is part of the job of the president and his people.

Fox News is not a news organization, they say, because it has a point of view. In an interview on NBC a few days ago, the president himself explained that this is because Fox News is more like talk radio than news. That same week, he was hosting a private press gaggle with Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow from MSNBC, which is the left-wing mirror opposite of Fox News. It’s talk radio on TV where everyone agrees with President Obama.

It’s hard to believe the administration still thinks this is a good idea. But this does not appear to be a group of people who learn easily from their mistakes, or even have the ability to recognize when they’re making one.

Arrogance can do that to you. And it’s bound to end badly for them. It can end no other way.

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