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UN's Ban in DC Cedes Control to
Coverage, Of Closed Pools and White House Rules
Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of
Inner City Press at the UN: News Muse
UNITED
NATIONS, March 9 -- From Haiti
to the White House, the UN's Ban Ki-moon is on the move this week. His
communications operation in New York is somewhat less dynamic. A
request over
the weekend to the UN Spokesperson's office for information on media
access to
Ban's meeting Tuesday with President Obama, only announced late Friday,
was
met with this reply:
"The
last
I heard, we take our guidance from the White House, so you would need
to follow
up with the White House about press arrangements there. As I am not
traveling
with the delegation, I do not have the latest on logistics, so you
would need
to follow up on trip logistics with.. the UN Information Center in
Washington. We
are following up on your other queries."
Beyond the statement on from where
this UN
takes its guidance, inquiry Monday with the White House revealed that
while
usually leaders who come to meet with Obama bring in their own press
contingent, in this case the UN has made no request for any journalists
to enter
the White House with Ban. (It is not yet clear if the UN is bringing
its own
in-house UN Photo and UN Television.) On this basis, the White House
press
office's verdict was that "the pool is closed." Whether the new
spokesman of the US Mission to the UN may re-open the pool - "c'mon in,
the water's fine" -- is not yet known. He has at least
asked a colleague to try. At 4:32 p.m., it was said that "the pool is
pretty set," and that "no stakeout is expected since President and Sec.
General like to give remarks to pool." For next in this series, still
pre-White House, click here.
Ambassador Susan Rice, after taking three
questions Tuesday at noon at the Security Council stakeout, said she
had to run to a plane to get to the DC meeting.
A request to the UN's Media Accreditation and
Liaison Unit yielded that
none of the reporters traveling from Haiti in Bill Clinton's plane with
Ban and "a
group of potential investors" planned to stay in Washington to
cover Ban's
visits to the White House, to the State Department and Capitol Hill.
UN's Ban in Haiti, an openness to media apparently not carried over to
DC
A request to the UN Information Center
in Washington
resulted in a
belated response that while nothing could or would be done about access
to cover
Ban's White House meeting, "there are two press availabilities
scheduled on Capitol Hill on Wednesday; one after the morning
meeting with
the House Foreign Affairs Committee, then a second after the afternoon
meeting
with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The Committees'
respective
spokespersons are handling the arrangements for those."
By
contrast, when for example the Greek foreign
minister recently
traveled to Washington and the UN in New York, her office brought a
pool of
journalists in tow, and stopped
to answer questions, including from Inner City
Press. How can it be that the UN, with an extensive Department of
Public
Information and Spokesperson's Office, claims it has no control over
how
reporters can have access to cover Ban's meetings with those he "takes
guidance" from? We will be endeavoring to cover these meetings
regardless.
Watch this site.
Footnote: It appears that in Haiti
Ban did not, unlike the leader of
the Security Council's trip Jorge Urbina who has said he
will, raise the issue of the 107 UN Peacekeepers repatriated to Sri
Lanka from Haiti for sexual abuse. But the sexual crimes version of
the TV show
Law and Order came and filmed at the UN on March 7, as the UN's Deputy
Spokesperson Marie Okabe described in great detail on Monday.
She named the
actors and the characters they
play, where they filmed in the UN and that the results will be shown on
NBC
on March 24 -- at 10 p.m. eastern. It sounded like an advertisement.
Some say
it will be good for the UN, to get it the publicity it seems to crave.
But why
then make no provision for UN correspondents to be able to cover Ban's
meeting
with Obama?
Click here for Inner City
Press' Feb 26 UN debate
Click
here
for Feb.
12 debate on Sri Lanka http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/17772?in=11:33&out=32:56
Click here for Inner City Press' Jan.
16, 2009 debate about Gaza
Click here for Inner City Press'
review-of-2008 UN Top Ten debate
Click here for Inner
City Press' December 24 debate on UN budget, Niger
Click here from Inner City Press'
December 12 debate on UN double standards
Click here for Inner
City Press' November 25 debate on Somalia, politics
Click here for Inner City
Press Nov. 7 debate on the war in Congo
Watch this site, and this Oct. 2 debate, on
UN, bailout, MDGs
and this October 17 debate, on
Security Council and Obama and the UN.
* * *
These
reports are
usually also available through Google
News and on Lexis-Nexis.
Click
here
for a Reuters
AlertNet piece by this correspondent
about Uganda's Lord's Resistance Army. Click
here
for an earlier Reuters AlertNet piece about the Somali
National
Reconciliation Congress, and the UN's $200,000 contribution from an
undefined trust fund. Video
Analysis here
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