PRESS

A Mr. Dana Milbank, a columnist at the Washington Post, feels seriously aggrieved that the press was excluded from the meetings of the forty-odd heads of state meeting in Washington to discuss nuclear proliferation. Good grief! The boys and girls who so entertain us with questions when they are admitted, had to do without their sandwiches and peanuts?

I have attended press conferences and such events for decades: so puerile and provincial were the questions asked -- not to speak of the answers given -- that I made myself a rule: where the press goes (whether in their scores or their hundreds) there go not I. To admit the press to such occasions is to exclude diplomacy, which is a personal matter. I never felt I had any entitlement to information; I had to overhear gossip, to question friends, to move about in the shadows, to talk to assistants and assistants to assistants to get what I wanted. And what I wanted was not some handout, but a feel for the event and the people involved.

This whine from Mr. Milbank, on behalf of media to whom no one pays serious attention, is particularly absurd when the subject discussed is clearly one in which (a) high risk is involved. and (b) the President could be expected to discuss, openly, such intelligence information as he had. Kowtowing to our dim press and even dimmer television is one of our fatal mistakes. Good reporters are discreet and have long-standing relationships with people who move about in government circles. When both sides -- press and the state -- have built up relations of mutual respect, then reporting and governing both become better. All that a reporter needs to know is much more likely to come over a good dinner with a trusted source than from any number of press conferences.

The sad truth is that our reporters have largely become adversaries, and not very good ones at that. That is not how you get invited to the high table. For that, you have to be interesting in and of yourself, have decent manners, and know your place.