During my decade covering the State Department across four administrations — and until recently — the rules my fellow journalists and I followed were clear. Foggy Bottom, as the department is known because of the neighborhood where it’s located, was our principal daily source of foreign-policy news, although the White House set the broad policy direction.
We attended the department’s daily press briefing, participated in special briefings on specific topics and interviewed officials in various bureaus. Even when that reporting produced no real news, it often gave us ideas for enterprise stories that required a greater time investment.
When an administration announced a new foreign-policy initiative, a principal — the secretary of state or even the president — made an initial, big-picture statement, usually in person. In the most consequential cases, they might take questions from the press. More often, lower-level officials with subject-matter expertise provided substantive briefings or one-on-one interviews.
Those interviews helped us understand complex technical matters, such as arms control and economic sanctions, so we could explain them to the public in plain English.
That world no longer exists. The State Department has lost its voice, most news about U.S. diplomacy now comes out of the White House.
The rules of the game have changed so drastically that reporters have been reduced to deciphering a mercurial president’s social-media posts, often written hastily in the middle of the night. Some effectively reverse decades-old U.S. policies, completely bypassing the interagency process that governed policymaking for more than half a century.
There is no daily press briefing at either the State Department or the White House. In fact, there is barely any interaction with the press at State, and one-on-one interviews have all but disappeared. Career officials, paralyzed by fear, tend to stay away from reporters. At least the White House still holds briefings once in a while.
One of our interns at the Washington International Diplomatic Academy, Jacob DiDonato, spoke with U.S. and foreign journalists about how this new reality has affected their work for a story in our e-journal, Diplomatic Diary.
“The decision-making and the communications have been overwhelmingly White House-driven,” said Shaun Tandon, State Department correspondent for Agence France-Presse — though not in ways that help reporters do their jobs. Trump’s social-media posts have become the main news source, at the expense of more traditional forms of news-gathering.
“Instead of attending briefings, for example, you are on the edge of your seat looking for social media posts, which is quite different,” Tandon said. “Obviously, that’s not the way we want to do it. Anybody can look at social media, but our goal as journalists is still to do things in depth and find contacts who can flesh out the details.”
Read the full story in the Diplomatic Diary.
Nicholas Kralev is the founder and CEO of the Washington International Diplomatic Academy, and a former Financial Times and Washington Times correspondent. His books include “Diplomatic Tradecraft,” “America’s Other Army” and “Diplomats in the Trenches.”
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