Jack Shafer

Almost every professional American journalist accepts the convention that the private lives of the president’s pre-adult children — their participation in school and extracurricular events; their private trips; their personal lives — shall not be covered except, as was the case with the Bush twins, when they’re charged with breaking the law.

The cone of silence that usually shields the president’s children temporarily lifted early this week as a variety of outlets, including Huffington Post and Yahoo News, and the websites of the London Telegraph and the Australian, ran stories about Malia Obama’s vacation in school trip to Oaxaca, Mexico, with classmates and 25 Secret Service agents. The White House contacted the outlets and asked that the Web pages be tossed into the memory hole. Most complied, but not before the Blaze captured screenshots of them. The administration even persuaded Politico to redact its original report about the excised pages because it contained information that raised “security” concerns at the White House.

The acceptance of the White House kids’ convention is so universal that even the supermarket tabloids tend to drop their snooping cameras and gossip-pouring pens when it comes to presidential offspring, although Weekly World News columnist Ed Anger played the dissident when he asked: “Why Are Democrats’ Daughters So Ugly?” in the paper’s Aug. 25, 1992, issue, just before Bill Clinton won the presidential election. Anger concluded that if Clinton reached the White House, Chelsea would be the “prettiest” daughter of a Democratic president in 40 years, “but she’s no Tricia Nixon,” he added.

Only a press absolutist would insist that reporters should track the daily comings and goings of White House kids. As George W. Bush’s wife, Laura Bush, said when she and her family moved into the White House: “Our girls are not public figures. They’re the children of a president.” But it doesn’t take a press radical to squirm at the relative ease with which the White House “persuades” publications around the world to delete Web pages already viewed by thousands and perhaps millions of people. (As I write, Black Celebrity Kids still hosts its Malia-in-Mexico story, complete with location photos from Oaxaca.)

Here’s the justification for the White House redaction campaign, as expressed in an email from Kristina Schake, Michelle Obama’s communications director, to Politico’s Dylan Byers:

From the beginning of the administration, the White House has asked news outlets not to report on or photograph the Obama children when they are not with their parents and there is no vital news interest. We have reminded outlets of this request in order to protect the privacy and security of these girls.

Schake fails to explain the logic or wisdom behind the White House’s effort to unring a bell. Indeed, the White House’s post-hoc Malia blackout only prompted more stories about the young Obama’s vacation school trip location to appear, some of them in outlets that pride themselves on their restraint in not covering the president’s children, such as the Washington Post and New York Times. If the White House wins many more similar victories protecting Obama’s daughters from press inspection, we’ll probably learn the home addresses of the girls’ best friends, the girls’ email passwords and the contents of the girls’ nightly prayers.

One would guess that the press has gotten nosier about presidential kids over the decades, but a content-coverage study from November 1963 to January 2001 of all 22 children who lived in the White House shows otherwise. The press seems to have dialed down its coverage. The Johnson daughters, Luci and Lynda Bird, received far and away the most attention in the New York Times of any children who lived in the White House in recent decades. There were 200 Times stories on Luci and 237 on Lynda Bird. (No adjustment is made for the number of years lived in the White House, and the study is limited to the Times and TV network news.) The number of Times clips about the Nixon daughters, Tricia (125) and Julie (102), trails those devoted to the Johnson girls. Pulling up the rear are the story totals for Amy Carter (43), Susan Ford (37) and Chelsea Clinton (32).

The book in which the study appears, Life in the White House : A Social History of the First Family and the President’s House, finds that Chelsea Clinton was the most popular TV-news subject, then Tricia Nixon, the adult Maureen Reagan (and primarily because she was so vocal), Julie Nixon, and Amy Carter. “First daughters, at least since 1963, have received an overwhelming amount of news coverage when compared to their male counterparts,” the book reports, although coverage might be a function of their youth, not their gender, it adds.

In his Washington Post piece, Paul Farhi establishes that today’s media landscape can no longer be regulated by presidential administrations and the established media organizations that subscribe to the White House’s ideas of what constitutes news. Towson University professor Martha Joynt Kumar tells Farhi: “Everyone has an iPhone and takes pictures. Everyone has [access to social media] … The conditions have changed, and it’s much harder to control information.”

The old-fashioned command-and-control model — in which the White House limits information about presidential children and the press obeys its requests to suppress reportage about them — can’t possibly continue even if it’s the “fair” thing for the kids. Like it or not, White House kids have become a kind of temporary American royalty, visual appendages to the father’s political ambitions, and all the presidential jawboning in the world can’t blot that out. What sort of sense does it make for the White House to continue to bully the mainstream press into covering the president’s family in a way that pleases the president when the mainstream press calls the shots?

The willingness of the websites, both inside and outside the mainstream, to erase stories that personally offend the president — even if as a father he has a right to be offended — speaks poorly of the press. I can understand why powerful media outlets might be frightened of earning the animus of the president. They depend on White House access to report news. But the spinelessness displayed by the London Telegraph, Yahoo News, the Huffington Post, and the other self-redacting sites in the face of White House criticism makes me yearn for a press baron who is willing to stand by his mistakes, not secret them in the nearest dustbin. (Call me a latter-day Ed Anger, but I don’t want to live in a world in which it’s all right for the government to assemble databases of my every airline flight but the president goes space-alien wild about a news report of a trip his daughter has taken.)

Besides, it’s not like the press has been invading the Obama daughters’ privacy. A Nexis search of “Malia Obama” turns up only 17 New York Times stories since her father was inaugurated. Of those 17 stories, two are about the spring break hoo-hah, and most of the others are incidental mentions. “Sasha Obama” returns only 13 hits.

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I worked hard to exclude the phrases “First Lady” and “First Family” from my copy because it makes them sound, you know, royal. If you approve of my hard work, drop me a line at Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I’m told that my Twitter feed is big in Oaxaca. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns and subscribe to this hand-built RSS feed for corrections to my column.

PHOTO: Michelle Obama (R) stands with her daughter Malia as President Barack Obama (L) delivers remarks during a day of service to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Browne Education Campus school in Washington, January 16, 2012. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Ivan Lewis energized freethinkers everywhere today by proposing that the naughty U.K. press be reined in by “a new system of independent regulation.” In his speech to the Labour Party conference, the Labour shadow culture secretary called for the press to “consider whether people guilty of gross malpractice should be struck off,” by which he meant banned from the practice of journalism.

The U.K. press immediately roared back—all but accusing Lewis of campaigning for a cabinet position as Minister of Censorship. Lewis then retreated on Twitter. “I said industry should consider whether gross malpractice should lead to a journo being struck off and i oppose state oversight of press,” he wrote.

By the end of the day, Lewis was backpedaling faster, telling the BBC, “I regret the fact that there has been a response to something that I didn’t say.”

Yeah, yeah, Ivan, but I think we got your message the first time: When a scandal swallows police, newspaper executives, media moguls, private detectives, the prime minister, and journalists, your remedy would not be jail time for those who broke existing laws. What you want is a special “independent” body that would ostracize and shun the rotten journalists. Maybe even build a leper colony for them.

But as Helen Lewis-Hasteley writes on the New Statesman website today, no mechanism exists in the U.K. to disbar or otherwise “strike off” a rotten journalist. The news profession doesn’t accredit journalists—they’re not like doctors or lawyers or accountants with specific professional qualifications! It follows that there’s no industry-wide consensus on what constitutes gross journalistic malpractice. Likewise, the U.K. has no power to create a registry to prevent rotten journalists from practicing their craft, which means implementing Lewis’ modest proposal  would require a law spanning all print and electric media. You’d have to govern the U.K. the way the Communist Party governs China if you wanted to appoint guardians to stand at the gates of the Web to prevent shamed individuals from setting up blogs or otherwise expressing themselves.

Even if such a registry of banned journalists were conjured into existence, posits Lewis-Hasteley, how would it be enforced? She writes:

If we look at the countries around the world where the government keeps such a register, I bet they’re not the ones you’d regard as shining beacons of democracy and enlightenment. Who would administer the register? What would the appeals procedure be? How much would it cost to join?

Maybe Lewis can figure this all out by staging a fact-finding mission for himself and other members of Parliament to Zimbabwe and Nicaragua, where the state licenses (PDF) journalists.

“Will [Lewis] jam bloggers from outside Britain?” asks Roy Greenslade in the Guardian. “Are we to take the Chinese path by setting up a battery of digital censors located in some Whitehall technology centre?”

Lewis isn’t alone in calling for a new regulatory apparatus. Tory Prime Minister David Cameron made similar noises in July—sans the “striking off” innovation. Cameron called for the establishment of a new regulatory body that would be “independent” of both the press and the government. How the new watchdog agency Lewis and Cameron advocate would differ from the current, voluntary watchdog, the incompetent Press Complaints Commission, is not obvious. The Economist recently judged the PCC as not “so much toothless as blind” in investigating and policing the phone-hacking scandal (which is just about right) and called for the PCC to be put out of its misery.

If truly independent of the press and state, the new regulator would have no power and be accountable to nobody. That would amount to reinventing the PCC. If given the power to police the press, the new regulator’s existence would be a greater crime against humanity than all the phone-hackings put together.

There is no shortage of laws on the books to deter a resurgence of phone-hacking. Phone-hacking is against the law, as is ordering an employee to hack phones. Paying bribes to police is against the law. Destroying evidence is against the law. Perjury is against the law. If U.K. journalists violated these laws, U.K. police and U.K. courts have plenty of “regulatory” power to punish their “gross malpractice” without setting up a new version of the PCC.

In 1704, Daniel Defoe confronted an earlier set of censors with his pamphlet “An Essay on the Regulation of the Press.” He had it much worse: Back then, both the meddling state and the church hassled writers.

“To cure the ill use of liberty, with a deprivation of liberty,” Defoe wrote, “is like cutting off the leg to cure the gout in the toe, like expelling poison with too rank a poison, where both may struggle which poison shall prevail, but which soever prevails, the patient suffers.”

Will somebody pass along to Lewis that—especially in the Web era—there are no journalists? There are only acts of journalism. People who commit acts of journalism for a living deserve no special treatment from the government, such as shield laws. But neither do they deserve new laws or “voluntary” regulations that would blackball them.

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There’s another great line in the Defoe pamphlet that I couldn’t squeeze into this piece. “I know no nation in the world, whose government is not perfectly despotick, that ever makes preventive laws, ’tis enough to make laws to punish crimes when they are committed, and not to put it in the power of any single man, on pretence of preventing offences to commit worse.” Send your favorite Defoe lines to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com or rescue me from the lonely island of my Twitter feed. (This RSS feed rings every time a new Shafer column goes live. This hand-built one rings every time a correction is filed.)

PHOTO: The last edition of News of the World newspaper goes on sale alongside other British Sunday newspapers in London July 9, 2011. REUTERS/Paul Hackett