The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House

by Ben Rhodes

I’d wake up between six and seven. Each morning, an appointed White House “media monitor” would send a list of news stories to a large group of staff, anything having to do with Obama or, to a smaller list, national security. The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, the wires (AP, Reuters, Bloomberg, AFP), then Politico, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the congressional dailies (The Hill, Roll Call), an assortment of right-wing media (Fox News, the New York Post, The Daily Caller, Breitbart), transcripts from the various television morning shows, longer magazine pieces, and—in later years—notable tweets. This is how I got my news for ten years—by scrolling through my BlackBerry, reading different versions of the same story, looking for a shift in the narrative about Obama or our foreign policy, for what might raise an international issue that was escaping attention, for what lines of attack Republican critics were repeating in ways that might signal a new, coordinated effort—to keep Gitmo open, to bomb somebody, to portray Obama as un-American. I could tell they were getting traction if I also got emails from reporters, cutting and pasting a quote from a Republican critic and asking if I had a response. This was Washington presenting a constant choice: Ignore something and let it stand, or feed it oxygen by hitting back.