According to
Lloyd Grove's Lowdown column in the New York Daily News, W said this to New Yorker writer Ken Auletta while the reporter was sitting in on an Oval Office interview with the British Press.
The small story is more about the White House's disdain for the Press, and how it's starting to piss them off. But that one quote just kind of jumps out atcha.
Yeesh. Whattaguy.
Here's the entire blurb. Or you can just read the
entire column in the Daily News.
W & aides broadcast media hate
He didn't free the slaves.
He didn't rid the world of Hitler.
He didn't even - like his father - preside over the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
Yet George W. Bush tells New Yorker writer Ken Auletta: "No President has ever done more for human rights than I have."
With stunners like that, no wonder he spends so little time with journalists.
The President's eyebrow-raising assertion comes during some Oval Office chitchat after Auletta - writing about the testy relations between the Bush White House and the news media - sits in on an interview with a British newspaper reporter.
In the latest New Yorker, Auletta reports that Bush and his minions have little use for the Fourth Estate.
Political guru Karl Rove claims that the job of journalists is "not necessarily to report the news. It's to get a headline or get a story that will make people pay attention to their magazine, newspaper or television more."
And Chief of Staff Andy Card scoffs: "[The media] don't represent the public any more than other people do. In our democracy, the people who represent the public stood for election."
Card argues that it's not the responsibility of top White House policymakers to provide reporters with facts.
"It's not our job to be sources. The taxpayers don't pay us to leak!" Card tells Auletta. "Our job is not to make your job easy."
Predictably, the reporters who cover Bush aren't happy. The Washington Post's Dana Milbank complains: "My biggest frustration is that this White House has chosen an approach ...to engage us as little as possible." And the New York Times' Elisabeth Bumiller grouses: "Too often they treat us with contempt."
Free the White House press corps!