How Washington officials bested the media

[Commentary] Ten years ago when I was White House press secretary, before Twitter and Facebook, in an era when reporters used to pick up their phones to conduct interviews as opposed to e-mailing, I would have been laughed out of the briefing room if I tried to get quote approval for something I said.

Occasionally, I talked on background as a senior administration official, but no reporter would ever let me pick and choose which on-the-record quotes they could use nor would anyone let me edit or clean up a quote. My how things have changed -- and the change began, it's important to note -- toward the end of the second term of George W. Bush. Peter Baker, another reporter at The New York Times who has covered the last three White Houses, told me in an (on-the-record) interview that quote approval evolved from something beneficial to a "pernicious practice to be avoided." Like Prohibition, it began with good intent. Reporters covering Bush's second term, under pressure from editors not to use unnamed sources in their stories, started asking their sources if a background quote, attributed to a senior aide, could instead be turned into an on-the-record quote, with the aide's name in print. I e-mailed last week with several former Bush staffers and many confirmed they engaged in that practice. For a very limited number of the most senior aides, that made sense.

[Ari Fleischer, a CNN contributor, was White House press secretary in the George W. Bush administration from 2001 to 2003]