Ari Fleischer on the White House Press Corps and Cable News “Landscape”

Today at the Paley Center for Media, the IFC Media Project hosted a panel on how national and international press coverage differs.

Katty Kay of the BBC described the European media’s campaign coverage. “Let’s not pretend that 99.9% of Europe wanted Obama to be president,” she said. “There was definitely a sense that the European media was in the tank for Obama.”

Al-Jazeera English host Josh Rushing is not a fan of U.S. TV news. “Television, I think, absolutely sucks here,” he said. “We exist in our own media island.”

Former Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer and DailyBeast.com founder Tina Brown both described the conflict inherent in TV news. “It’s a dramatic medium…It’s totally about conflict,” said Brown, while Fleischer thought “the first and worst bias is conflict.”

Before the panel we talked to Fleischer about which members of the White House press corps are doing a good job, the current cable news landscape and how he’d grade his successor Robert Gibbs 100 days in:



Click continued to see a clip of the first episode, about Al-Jazeera English…

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