White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel knows how to get results. With President Obama to back him up, he’s certainly not afraid of going to the top to make things happen. And happen it did, for the most recent prime-time presidential press conference:
In the days before President Obama’s last news conference, as the networks weighed whether to give up a chunk of their precious prime time, Rahm Emanuel went straight to the top.
Rather than calling ABC, the White House chief of staff phoned Bob Iger, chief executive of parent company Disney. Instead of contacting NBC, Emanuel went to Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric. He also spoke with Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, the company spun off from Viacom.
Whether this amounted to undue pressure or plain old Chicago arm-twisting, Emanuel got results: the fourth hour of lucrative network time for his boss in six months. But network executives have been privately complaining to White House officials that they cannot afford to keep airing these sessions in the current economic downturn.
There is no doubt that the White House is pretty intimate with the mainstream media. However, the fact that Mr. Emmanuel had to talk to the chief executives of the parent companies of these TV networks only shows that there’s diminishing interest in carrying such money-losing press conferences.
