The White House Scrambles to Tame the News Cyclone

Here are a few scenes from a revolution: In early February, Barack Obama ended a six-month press-conference drought by taking questions from YouTube. When a madman crashed his plane into a Texas office building a couple of weeks later, the White House responded on its blog. And during the bipartisan summit on health reform, press secretary Robert Gibbs used Twitter to keep score.

The news cycle that once defined the day at the White House has given way to a more ferocious beast. Call it the news cyclone, a massive force without beginning or end that churns constantly and seems almost impervious to management. In response, Obama's advisers have had to remake the rules of presidential p.r. "We have a theory of how the news media work in this Internet age," explains Dan Pfeiffer, the buzz-cut 34-year-old who recently became the third person to serve as Obama's communications director. "There is basically a constant swirl going on." (See the top 10 Obama gaffes.)

This twister still includes the newspaper front pages, nightly news broadcasts and magazine covers that can often shape the national debate. But it also incorporates Sarah Palin's Facebook page, the latest Internet attack videos and that e-mail your aunt just sent you. "There is a constant conversation that goes on all day long, through blogs, through cable TV, through Twitter, between reporter, subject and reader," says Pfeiffer, who sits down the hall from the Oval Office. He says his new job is to "make sure we are not getting swallowed up by the swirl."

During the 2008 campaign, Obama's team was able to exploit new technologies as no political campaign had before. It created its own media empire — an e-mail list with 13 million subscribers, a YouTube channel with millions of views and a massive social-networking operation. "What the voters heard, we determined," boasted Anita Dunn, a top campaign aide, "as opposed to some editor in a TV station." (See the top 10 campaign t-shirts.)

But the White House has proved to be a harder perch from which to dominate the conversation. Last summer, a single phrase — "death panels" — nearly derailed health care reform, as town halls were flooded with angry voters who got their information online. That there was no proposal for anything that resembled a death panel did not matter; the idea went viral anyway. "The process for covering the President hasn't changed as much as the medium of the media has," explains Gibbs, who recently joined Twitter and promptly earned 34,000 followers. "You have a complete segmentation of the media that you haven't had before." (See 10 ways Twitter will change American business.)

Just 30 years ago, White House press aides could work with only a handful of reporters and producers to get their story before 50 million network-news viewers every night and all over the papers the next morning. By contrast, Obama's most recent prime-time news conference, which was carried live July 22 on cable news, NBC, CBS and ABC, reached a combined audience of 24.7 million, according to Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University who studies presidential communications. To compensate, Obama's message advisers spent the first year keeping their boss on as many outlets as they could — with 129 press interviews in his first 10 months in office, compared with 44 for George W. Bush and 51 for Bill Clinton. Whenever possible, Obama positioned himself to speak to the American people directly, with four prime-time press conferences, two major addresses before Congress and countless daytime events that garnered live coverage. But in a year-end review of communications performance, Pfeiffer and Dunn found that the President often lost control of the conversation by focusing too much on governing while the opposition campaigned against him, exploiting the cyclone's appetite for controversy even when it lacked a foundation in fact. Now, Pfeiffer says, the Administration will be better armed to react, with faster, more aggressive responses through more types of media. (See the top 10 Facebook stories of 2009.)

White House officials admit there are risks in rejoining the scrum. "There is a theory among some in sports that SportsCenter has had this terrible impact on the fundamentals of sports because they highlight slam dunks and fancy passes," explains Pfeiffer. "The current media culture doesn't reward getting things done in government. It rewards saying the most outlandish things."

But the cyclone is the new reality, and respect must be paid. "You can't really control it," Pfeiffer says. "You've just got to sort of edge it in one direction or another."

See the top 10 news stories of 2009.

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