Governor Meets the World’s Press

They came from all over the world, journalists from 17 media organizations representing 14 countries and five continents, to collect the prize they had sought for months: about 10 minutes of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s time.

Deluged since his inaugural by hundreds of requests from foreign journalists to interview California’s foreign-born governor, Schwarzenegger’s aides declared Friday “International Media Day.”

From 9:30 a.m. until a few minutes past 1 o’clock, Schwarzenegger conducted rapid-fire interviews in the governor’s office in downtown Los Angeles with a diverse array of foreign reporters, from a Chilean TV reporter to an English business editor to competing Japanese correspondents.

The journalists said that while the interviews produced little hard news, the importance of the foreign media day was that Schwarzenegger held one at all. Such extensive series of interviews are commonplace for a president or, well, a movie star, but unheard of for a California governor. “Who wants to talk to Gray Davis?” said Matthias Hohensee, the Silicon Valley bureau chief for the weekly German business magazine Wirtschafts Woche.

Despite the United Nations feel of the day, many of the foreign journalists’ questions were familiar queries about California issues, from the budget to workers’ compensation to gay marriage. Interviews were in English, though the governor chatted in German with some journalists.

Schwarzenegger, as part of his strategy of “selling California,” tried to turn the interviews into appeals for foreign tourists and businesses to come to California. But the foreign journalists, by their own accounts and those of two gubernatorial aides, often changed the subject to Schwarzenegger’s views on the war in Iraq and President Bush. Both are broadly unpopular in nearly all of the countries that sent journalists to meet the governor.

“On Iraq, he didn’t really engage the question,” said Bruno Giussani, a Swiss writer.

Terri Carbaugh, a spokeswoman for the governor, said Schwarzenegger “made clear it’s his job to stay focused on the state” and that the war is a question for the federal government.

Many of the journalists were having their first in-person encounter with Schwarzenegger’s famously controlled media operation, but it didn’t take long before they began to echo seasoned California reporters in their complaints about aides’ restrictions on their access to the governor.

Foreign television reporters had 10 minutes for one-on-one interviews. Print reporters interviewed the governor in teams of three, sharing sessions of about 20 minutes.

Print journalists were not allowed to bring their own photographers, though some brought personal cameras to take pictures of themselves with Schwarzenegger.

A photographer working for the governor took still pictures for publication and distributed them to reporters on compact disc.

Most reporters said they were impressed with the intelligence and policy command of a governor who is thought of primarily as a movie star in their home countries. But they also expressed frustration at a lack of time for follow-up questions.

“I was a little disappointed -- we would have liked more time,” said Isabel Rodriguez, a reporter for the Chilean public TV network TVN.

She had made a 12-hour flight Wednesday night -- from the Chilean capital of Santiago to Lima, Peru, to Los Angeles -- for her 10 minutes.

Gubernatorial aides said they understood the foreign journalists’ desire for more time but wanted to accommodate as many people as they could.

An editor and a reporter from the weekly magazine of the Mexican newspaper El Universal pressed the governor on his positions on immigration. The editor, Pascal Beltran del Rio, said the governor’s reversal of a law permitting illegal immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses and his previous support for Proposition 187 means that many Mexicans “see him as anti-immigrant, as a racist, even though he’s an immigrant himself.”

But the interviews were largely friendly, and Schwarzenegger seemed to enjoy the exchanges. “Man, those Hungarian journalists are tough,” he said with a smile after an interview with Hungarian TV.

The only print reporter to have a one-on-one session with the governor was David Parkin, business editor of the Yorkshire Post, a regional newspaper in Leeds, England. Parkin said he appeared to owe his good fortune to his paper’s reputation and to an interview he conducted with Lord James Hanson, a business tycoon who married an American (after his engagement to Audrey Hepburn famously broke off). Parkin said he believed Hanson’s contacts in the governor’s office put in a good word.

“We’re not a newspaper that spends a lot of money on travel,” said Parkin. “But to be the first paper in the U.K. to get an interview -- this is a big story for us.”