In the wake of the Jeff Gannon imbroglio last year, I decided to I wanted to get someone in to the White House press room to report for my blog. Despite having no good idea of how to go about doing that, I asked around for someone who lived in the DC area and would be willing to take a shot at doing the institutional press's job for them.
Eric Brewer, whom I knew from posting on Slate's readers forums, said he'd be willing to give it a go, so I started calling the White House media affairs office and trying to break through the intern wall.
It took about ten days of calling two or three times a day to get anywhere, but I finally reached someone who could and was willing to clear Eric for a day pass. I dummied up a BTC News press pass, he managed to survive the criminal background check, and off he went.
He didn't quite win the distinction of being the first blogger in the door — Media Bistro's Garrett Graff beat us to it by a few days, with the help of the White House Correspondent's Association — but in the door he went, and he's been there on a fairly regular basis ever since.
Times have changed a bit since Eric first started blogging from the press room. Reporters for the institutional press have become considerably bolder as the scandals mount and the president's popularity tanks. But from his first question and onward, Eric has asked consistently tough, intelligent and fact-based questions that other reporters either didn't think of or just avoided.
I've written a testimonial to Eric on the blog, with some specifics about the questions he's asked that no one else has, and about his success in getting McClellan to inadvertantly answer questions or tie himself into knots avoiding them, but what I'd like to do here is just raise a toast to him for doing something incredibly gutsy. I'm proud of having gotten him in the door, but I couldn't then and still can't imagine standing up in front of a room full of reporters and asking nasty questions of the president's mouthpiece.
That's a pretty astonishing thing to do for someone with no background in journalism. I've done some reporting in my much younger days, but always one on one, without an audience, and in a much less rarefied forum. Eric asked me for advice the day before he went for the first time, and the only thing I could really offer him was "write your questions down, take a deep breath and maybe a xanax and see what happens."
And that's what he did, minus the xanax. And he's kept doing it, and he's done it really, really well. He's a very private guy and probably won't especially enjoy being the subject of a congratulatory post, but he well deserves it so here it is.
Cheers, dude.