PHOTO: File photo of Brit Hume (left), chief Washington correspondent, and Roger Ailes, president of the Fox News Channel. (Bob Riha, Jr., USA TODAY)

Bush, aides boost access of conservative media

By Mimi Hall, USA TODAY

WASHINGTON — On his fifth day in office, Vice President Cheney granted his first radio interview to Common Sense Radio and its conservative host, Oliver North. At his first news conference as president, on a trip to Mexico last month, President Bush skipped over the major TV network correspondents and turned to Fox News Channel's Jim Angle. "You're next," he told the cable network's correspondent after wire service reporters, who by custom go first at presidential news conferences, asked their questions.

And this month, when Cheney gave his first vice-presidential interview to a Washington newspaper, the outlet he chose was not The Washington Post, the capital city's traditional must-read for politicians and journalists. Instead, Cheney talked to The Washington Times, a much smaller newspaper known for its conservative tilt — and its access to important conservatives in government.

In the Clinton White House, newspapers with conservative news or editorial pages, and broadcasters with conservative programming, were ostracized.

How times have changed.

West Wing television sets that were almost always tuned to CNN during the Clinton years are now on Fox News Channel, whose political talk shows are dominated by conservative commentators. And after eight years of feeling frozen out, reporters from news outlets with conservative programming are winning a much friendlier reception from Bush and his aides.

The shift started on the campaign trail. Bush's audiences occasionally booed CNN reporter Candy Crowley and held up signs slamming the "Clinton News Network." Sometimes they cheered Carl Cameron of Fox News. "It was flattering and unsettling," says Cameron, whose fellow reporters say he's as objective as any of them. "It suggested a perception that I would often disabuse people of."

Now that Bush is in the White House, the reporters warmly received on the campaign trail are getting more access to top aides. It's part of a strategy to get more coverage — and more positive coverage — by spending time with right-leaning and outside-the-Washington-beltway journalists.

Talking to news outlets with conservative audiences, and to local newspapers and TV stations, "gives you an opportunity to take your message unfiltered to voters who are listening," says Cheney's press secretary, Juleanna Glover Weiss.

Earlier this month, Bush gave interviews to three of the biggest newspapers that cover the White House — The New York Times, The Washington Post and USA TODAY — and to The Washington Times. Wesley Pruden says, editor of The Washington Times, says, "I think the Bush White House figures they're going to get a fair shot with us, and I think that's true."

But Bush and Cheney have spent considerably more time talking to reporters from other parts of the country. Last week, Bush promoted his budget and tax proposals during an interview with a half-dozen regional newspapers, including The Indianapolis Star and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

White House aides say local reporters tend to be less jaded than their Washington counterparts, and local newspapers are more likely to print big stories even if Bush and Cheney don't say anything new. "You get more play, more column inches, more time on the evening news," Weiss says.

Interviews with outlets favored by conservative voters are meant to energize the party faithful.

Inside the White House, "now they're listening to me instead of NPR," North crows, referring to National Public Radio, which has a generally liberal audience.

In the Clinton White House, press secretaries were sometimes dismissive of reporters from conservative newspapers and stations — or they ignored them.

Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer says he calls on most everyone who raises a hand at his televised daily briefings. "I don't think the press secretary should pick and choose based on an agenda or ideology," he says. But North says the administration will turn to shows such as his, which he boasts has "2 million right-wing radio listeners," to help rally the Republican troops.

North, who was a Reagan aide, says he doesn't "pitch softball" questions. But when he interviewed Cheney on Jan. 24 and Cheney noted that the U.S. military has a new commander in chief, North replied, "Thank God!" He called Vice President Gore's efforts to streamline the government a "colossal failure" and called Clinton's energy policy "incoherent."

This month, after Cheney spoke to The Washington Times, the White House was rewarded with four-and-a-half pages of coverage and an editorial that began, "There is no doubt that Washington has benefited vastly from President Bush's first six weeks in office."

But while conservative talk-show hosts gush, reporters bristle at the notion that they're playing into Bush's hand. Bush and his aides may call on Fox News reporters more often and they may spend more time watching Fox than CNN, but the Fox reporters who cover the news are generally regarded by their peers as fair and unbiased. No one in the White House press corps, for example, has said that Angle, a former NPR reporter, is giving the Bush administration an easier time just because his network is owned by conservative Rupert Murdoch.

The treatment Fox News is receiving from Bush aides is "certainly different than it was when the Clinton White House was doing everything it could to strangle Fox in its crib," says Washington bureau chief Brit Hume, referring to Clinton aides' favoritism of CNN when Fox News went on the air in 1996. Now Fox competes effectively with the three big networks, for example, in booking top administration players for the political talk show Fox News Sunday.

But Fox News correspondents attribute that more to ballooning ratings than to the fact that its so-called political entertainment shows feature conservative commentators such as Sean Hannity and former GOP House speaker Newt Gingrich. CNN is available in 20 million more households than Fox News is — but in the 59.3 million households that have both, more people watch Fox.

"We've had no favoritism from the Bush administration," Hume says. "They've just been treating us fairly, which is all we've ever asked and all we would ever expect."