Felix Salmon attended an off-the-record briefing at the Treasury Department today:
Treasury had its second big blogger meeting today, where Tim Geithner and other Senior Administration Officials (sorry, ground rules) fielded questions from a group of bloggers* which tilted heavily towards the newsier end of the
spectrum. The Center for American Progress was there in force, as were the Atlantic and the Huffington Post…..
*Daniel Indiviglio, Megan McArdle, Matthew Yglesias, Patrick Garofalo, Amanda Terkel, John Aravosis, Faiz Shakir, John Amato, James Kwak, Duncan Black, Sam Stein, Shahien Nasiripour, Ryan Grim, David Kurtz, Tim Fernholz, and me.
Having read a few posts from the bloggers in question, what I want to know is: Did they really learn anything? Did Geithner and the anonymous SAOs say anything interesting that they wouldn’t have said on the record? Or was it just a pure spin session? Felix gives a clue at the end of his post:
I came away with the impression that life at Treasury is not much fun, on a day-to-day basis, and that the stresses of trying to set economic policy in the face of strong opposition from both the banking lobby and the Republican party are wearing on the officials there. And I also came away with a photocopy of John Cassidy’s piece on Geithner in this week’s New Yorker: each of us got given it as some kind of Treasury party favor.
Josh Green has a big Geithner profile too, and now Treasury was inviting us bloggers in, and then there was that Vogue piece — there does seem to be some kind of PR offensive going on. But I’m not nearly enough of a Washington insider to hazard a guess as to who’s responsible, or why they might be doing it. But I’m sure it’s going to be a topic of conversation at the post-meeting dinner.
I’ve always felt that these kinds of anonymous sessions do more harm than good to the cause of good journalism, allowing government officials a chance to peddle their spin in person without really being held accountable for what they say. But that’s a cheap position for me to take since I’m out in California and never get invited to them anyway. So I’m genuinely curious: now that bloggers are going to these kinds of things, and what with blogging being so much more informal and conversational than regulation journalism, what do they really think? Did the Treasury folks say anything they couldn’t have said with their names attached? Was it genuinely interesting, or just a bunch of the same-old-same-old? What’s the verdict on this ancient Washington tradition?
