Robert Gibbs let about 14,000 extra people into the White House press room after the president's address to the nation on BP.
Ari MelberJust after President Obama’s national BP address on Tuesday night, press secretary Robert Gibbs took a few extra questions. But they weren’t from the White House press corps.
Gibbs cracked open the door of the press room to any citizen with an Internet connection, and on short notice, about 14,000 people submitted or voted on questions about the oil spill. Over 7,200 questions were submitted, and participation was deep, with an average thirteen votes cast per person. Several questions, read aloud by White House new media director Macon Phillips, focused on regulatory requirements for emergency shut-off switches, media access to the spill zone, techniques for cleaning up the spill and international collaboration in assisting the clean-up effort.
At one point, the citizen press conference cut to a video question from a young man named Jon Hocevar, standing on a dock in Grande Isle, Louisiana, who asked whether Obama would "end our reliance on fossil fuels and…shift to a clean and renewal energy future." The pointed query sounded more like activism than journalism, and it was—Hocevar directs Greenpeace’s "Oceans Campaign." On Tuesday, the environmental group posted Hocevar’s question on YouTube under the headline "Greenpeace question for President Obama."
The White House obviously took lots of heat for both its policy stance and press message on BP. Gibbs’s unusual foray online, dubbed "Open for Questions," seemed partly a calibration to show that the public face of the administration is not only talking to the usual suspects from the podium but also listening to a wider group of voices. (The White House has used the "Open for Questions" platform for cabinet secretaries and the president before, and Gibbs dabbled with the platform during the transition, though he ducked the most highly voted question at the time, about torture.) Here at The Nation, I had suggested the White House open up its press access as part of its public communication about this crisis:
Obama is rightly annoyed by the made-for-TV quality of oil spill criticism—the main character needs to show more anger in this scene—but instead of complaining on TV about TV, he should try changing the channel. He could hold more press conferences, and invite not only White House reporters but also environmental experts for a deeper exchange on the crisis. (Think less emotion, more acoustic switches.) To engage people in the Gulf region, he could dust off some of the technology from the old days and convene an unfiltered, online town hall for the most popular questions from regular people and citizen media on the ground. In other words, the solution to the White House’s press woes is pretty obvious: Stop complaining about the media you have, and start engaging the media you want. Of course, that assumes Obama’s stated desire for a deeper, more substantive conversation is genuine. He just has to prove it.
Compared to the devastation in the Gulf, of course, these questions of public engagement feel quite minor. But the White House deserves some credit for making staff available to engage citizens, experts and activists in a twenty-five-minute conversation that was a bit more open and thorough than much of the conventional national discussion of this environmental tragedy.
——— The White House’s "Open for Questions" video is available on YouTube.
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.