Does the Bush administration retaliate against reporters who don't play nice with the White House? Well, let's just say that Carol Coleman, the Washington correspondent for the Irish television network RTE, won't be interviewing President Bush again anytime soon -- or ever, for that matter.
In an interview timed to coincide with Bush's visit to Ireland over the weekend, the veteran reporter questioned the president aggressively about the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the subsequent occupation, interrupting him several times during the 11-minute exhange.
It was the first one-on-one presidential interview granted to Irish television since the Reagan administration, and the White House selected RTE from among a number of Irish media outlets that had requested time with Bush. Coleman returned the favor by asking pointed questions, and by noting that the president would be met in Ireland by large crowds protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
When Bush tried to justify the war on the basis of Saddam Hussein's use of weapons of mass destruction, Coleman quickly pointed out that no such weapons had been found. When he strayed from the topic of her questions -- which had been submitted to the White House three days in advance -- or gave rambling answers that threatened to eat up her allotted time, Coleman tried to bring him back to the point by interjecting follow-up questions.
The president became visibly irritated with Coleman, and evidently communicated his displeasure to his staff, because within 10 minutes of the interview's end, Coleman got a call from a White House communications officer, who berated her for the tone of her questions and for interrupting the president.
She was then told that an interview with first lady Laura Bush, tentatively scheduled for the next day, was canceled.
To top things off, the White House Office of Global Communications called the Irish Embassy in Washington to lodge a complaint about Coleman.“
They were concerned about the interviewer's style,” the spokeswoman said, adding that the White House also complained that Coleman showed a lack of respect for the president.
The administration's surrogates outside the government got into the act, too. Radical right-wingers on FreeRepublic.com posted the address and phone number of Coleman's Washington office, resulting in an answering machine full of abuse and invective, much of it in language common to sailors and, well, vice presidents.
The reaction of the Irish media to the White House's decision to lash out at Coleman was one of general bemusement. “Ms. Coleman was a fairly aggressive interviewer but no more so than would be the norm in Ireland, when a politician is the subject of the interview,” wrote the Irish Emigrant, a Web site delivering news to Irish expatriates in the United States.
Coleman was traveling over the weekend and did not respond to requests for comment. However, she discussed the interview during a report aired on RTE during the presidential visit.
“I asked questions that I believed were relevant, and there were a few stages at which I had to move him along for reasons of timing,” she said. “He's not used to being moved along by the American media. Perhaps they are a bit more deferential.”
Stephanie Shweiki, an RTE producer who was in the White House during the interview, defended both Coleman and the interview.
“She is not some kind of renegade reporter out to make the story about herself. That's not her style,” Shweiki said. “At the end of the day, I think [the president] expected it to be a softball interview.”
Coleman, her producer said, was “concerned that he was going to go off on tangents and not address the issues the people of Ireland wanted to know about.”
Shweiki also pointed out that Coleman had not deviated from the list of questions she'd submitted to the White House.
“She didn't come out of left field at all,” Shweiki said.
One of the raps against American journalists over the past several years has been an unwillingness to ask tough questions of the Bush administration, and one of the standard defenses has been that journalists have to pull their punches with this administration or else be punished with a loss of access.
Whether taking it easy on the administration to preserve the goodwill of the White House is defensible journalistic behavior is debatable, but the administration's treatment of Coleman is proof that the threat of retribution is very real.
Rob Garver is a freelance journalist living in Springfield, Virginia, and is currently studying at the Georgetown Public Policy Institute.
