The James Brady Briefing Room on Friday, July 22, 2022. (Tony St. James/FCR)
WASHINGTON – You might be surprised how small the room is.
I can think of another time I said that – when visiting Graceland and realizing Elvis didn’t live in a 20-thousand-square-foot mansion. Okay, it was 17,500 square feet, but still. This time, however, is about the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House.
The press briefing on Friday (07/22/22), set to begin promptly at 3:00 pm EDT, is always running late, according to the regular White House working press. At the podium was not the President, because he had recently tested positive for COVID, but rather the White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Dr. Ashish Jha who announced Joe Biden had shown him his “empty plate with crumbs.”
Unfortunately, I wasn’t inside the Briefing Room at the time because instead, we were waiting for an interview with White House energy advisor Amos Hochstein who was on campus for an economic briefing on gas prices with the President. Since that event was running late, we stood outside along Pebble Beach. This is the location just north of the West Wing where the major news networks set up for live cut-ins. These permanent tent shelters provide cover from the weather and elements but are only cooled by fans which do little in the heat and humidity.
For All Ag, All Day, our temporary setup was originally scheduled to be closest to the West Wing, with a great view of the White House residence in the background. However, a construction crew with loud machinery was busy working right in front of the space, which led to our move to the north side of the tent city – both for a better view of the background and for better audio. We were set up right next to NBC News (but not under a tent) and even shared a few words with Annelise Nielson from SkyNews Australia before her live broadcast.
Though the day seemed to be very uneventful, we were able to spend almost an hour in the Briefing Room to cool down. The room, originally a swimming pool built for President Roosevelt in 1933, now hosts 49 seats for journalists and a standing room only for others. The stage is only about 6 feet deep by 12 feet wide, and the ceiling is less than ten feet tall. The very back of the room is home to robotic cameras mounted from the ceiling and news producers who make sure any video from the room is perfect for a nationwide audience. While in the room, we witnessed a Fox News reporter providing cut-ins that would air later during regular programming. The 30-second report took 5 minutes to produce due to uneven lighting, a small amount of orange tape showing on a mic cable, a speck on the reporter’s shoulder causing a shine in the camera, and multiple takes as the reporter tried to recite a script he memorized and rehearsed.
The White House press pool (no pun intended) may or may not be aligned with you politically, but they are just people who go to work on a very special campus. They have access that most of us don’t, but at the end of the day, everyone from a camera operator, to a front-row correspondent, to a farm broadcaster in Floyd County all enter and exit through the same gate.
