Extreme Makeover: The Briefing Room Edition

Newsweek, August, 2006 by Holly Bailey

It's probably the dream of every president: to banish the press corps from the West Wing. This week the Bush team will do it for real, kicking reporters out of the White House for a long-overdue rehab of the press briefing room and workspace. Immortalized on TV and in movies as the glamorous place to be, the briefing room is, in reality, a dump with broken chairs, torn carpeting, dangling wires and a musty smell that's especially pungent in the summertime. One of the area's two bathrooms died long ago, and the air conditioner barely works. Recent rains seeped into the basement press area, flooding the C-Span booth and prompting reporters to duct-tape massive cracks that formed along the walls. "There are stains you don't want to know the origin of," says the Houston Chronicle's...

Read the full article with a Free Trial at MyWire.

Premium Content Partnership | MyWire provides an in-depth online archive library of reference works.