As president-elect Joe Biden prepares to lead a deeply divided country, what’s next for White House coverage? What can past coverage and recent experiences teach us about envisioning a better future for how journalists cover the president, and how Americans understand the United States?
Joining us with lessons from their firsthand experiences with the White House press corps are current Politico White House Correspondent Anita Kumar, former White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, and longtime CBS White House Correspondent Bill Plante. The program will be moderated by Subbu Vincent, director of Journalism and Media Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics.
Participants will learn:
- What the best White House coverage does well and how to do more of it.
- How to assess newsworthiness in covering the White House and administration, particularly during the pandemic. How do journalists decide what kind of attention to give different White House developments, and what’s the impact of those decisions on the country?
- Tips for covering the White House and Biden administration, given lessons from the last four years.
About the panelists
Anita Kumar serves as White House correspondent and associate editor, covering President Donald Trump and helping organize and guide coverage for POLITICO’s White House team.
Kumar joined POLITICO in 2019 after covering the White House for McClatchy’s chain of newspapers for six years. She reported on Hillary Clinton’s campaign for president in 2016 and Barack Obama’s re-election campaign in 2012.
Prior to that, she worked at the Washington Post, writing about Virginia politics, and the Tampa Bay Times, writing about local, state and federal government both in Florida and Washington. She started her career at the News & Advance in Lynchburg, Va. and worked briefly at the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C.
A native Virginian, Kumar grew up in Charlottesville and attended the University of Virginia.
Kumar was elected to the White House Correspondents’ Association board in July 2018 for a three-year term. She appears regularly on television and radio.
Dee Dee Myers has more than three decades of experience in global strategic communications and public affairs. Most recently, she served as Executive Vice President, Worldwide Corporate Communications and Public Affairs for Warner Bros. She also served as White House Press Secretary during President Bill Clinton’s first term and was the first woman to hold the position.
Bill Plante retired as a CBS News correspondent in November, 2016 after 52 years.
Plante was a CBS News White House correspondent during the administrations of Ronald Reagan (beginning in 1981), Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. During the administration of the first President Bush, he was CBS News’ State Department correspondent (1989-92). Plante’s reports were seen regularly on “CBS This Morning,” and the “CBS Evening News.”
He was based in CBS News’ Washington bureau beginning in December 1976. He covered every Presidential campaign since 1968. Before his first White House assignment, he covered general and off-year elections, including the national political conventions. In 1968, he reported on the campaigns of Hubert Humphrey and Richard Nixon. During the 1972 campaign, Plante’s assignments included covering candidates George McGovern and Sargent Shriver. In the summer of 1976, he covered Jimmy Carter and then, in the fall, Walter Mondale’s vice presidential campaign. Plante was a floor reporter at the 1988 Democratic and Republican National Conventions.
During the Reagan presidency, he covered the President’s activities and major overseas trips, including the historic summit meeting in Moscow with Mikhail Gorbachev. Plante was part of the CBS News team that received a 1986 Emmy Award for coverage of the Reagan-Gorbachev summit at Reykjavik, Iceland. He also covered Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign and was part of the CBS News team that won an Emmy Award for its coverage.
At the State Department, he covered Secretary of State James Baker’s trips to the Middle East, both before and after the Gulf War; the changing U.S.-Soviet relationship during that period; and the 1991 Middle East peace talks, among many others.
He served as anchor of the “CBS Sunday Night News” (1988-95).
About the moderator
Subramaniam (Subbu) Vincent is director for the Journalism and Media Ethics program. Subbu’s focus is on developing tools and frameworks to help advance new norms in journalism practice, ethical news product design and new vocabulary and signals to help the public process and demand ethical media. During 2017-18, Subbu was Tech Lead for The Trust Project at the Markkula Center. Prior to working for the Center, he was a 2016 John S Knight fellow at Stanford University.In his media career, he waspublisher and editor-in-chief for two news magazines in Bangalore, India. Prior to that, he was a software engineer in Silicon Valley.