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President George Bush, the lame duck who languished outside of the news spotlight--what he called the "klieg lights"--for most of 2008, elbowed his way back to the top of the network news agenda with his farewell press conference at the White House to kick off the week. His reflections on the disappointments of his tenure, his disdain for self-pity and the burdens of office were played extensively as the lead item on all three newscasts. The thoughts of soon-to-be-former President Bush were Story of the Day.

NBC had White House correspondent Chuck Todd narrate Bush's soundbites in a traditional news package format. He called the comments "vintage Bush--all that was missing was a rendition of the song My Way." ABC decided not to use a correspondent. Instead anchor Charles Gibson strung together a series of comments and then turned to This Week anchor George Stephanopoulos who observed that he saw "every single side of George Bush but it was all at the same time." CBS anchor Katie Couric consulted her network's in-house political analyst Dan Bartlett, who used to work as Bush's top flack, who "liked what I saw today" observing "a wide range of emotions and reflection and a lot of that steadfastness." CBS' White House correspondent Jim Axelrod found Bush "as introspective as I have ever seen him."

A trio of Bush's comments were picked up by all three newscasts. The first was when Bush mimicked a pretend President's whining about the burdens of office: "Why did the financial collapse have to happen on my watch. It is just pathetic, isn't it, self-pity?" The President did not elaborate on the identity of the imaginary Oval Office inhabitant whose complaints he was ridiculing.

Bush explained the reason for his decision not to inspect the damage caused by Hurricane Katrina immediately the floods happened: he wanted to avoid being criticized by the White House press corps. His arrival would have diverted the attention of local police officers, he explained, "and then your questions, I suspect, would have been: 'How could you possibly have flown Air Force One into Baton Rouge?'" NBC's Todd corrected the President when he claimed the Homeland Security helicopters had rescued 30,000 from the floods: "The actual number of rooftop rescues was much lower."

As for negatives, Bush singled out his Mission Accomplished banner and the abu-Ghraib prisoner-abuse photographs as Iraqi "disappointments." All three newscasts aired Bush's admission that "not having weapons of mass destruction was a significant disappointment," implying that he would have preferred it if Saddam Hussein's Iraq had been armed to the teeth after all. He cannot have meant that.

Bush confessed that sometimes he found himself "riding mountain bikes as hard as you possible can trying to forget for the moment" the burdens of office. As a former President he will not find himself with "the big straw hat and Hawaiian shirt sitting on some beach." Why not? "Particularly since I quit drinking."


Andrew Tyndall 1/14/09 7:34:59 pm

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