President’s News Meetings No Longer Useful: Speakes

White House spokesman Larry Speakes suggested today that presidential news conferences have “outgrown their usefulness” and defended the Reagan Administration’s tight controls on information to the media.

“I don’t know a corporation . . . that doesn’t try to control the message that goes to the public,” Speakes said during a Times Mirror panel discussion on the press and the President. “That’s the way the game is played.”

Commenting on complaints that reporters have too little access to Reagan, Speakes said, “Many institutions of the press have either outlived or outgrown their usefulness.”

As an example he cited televised news conferences, saying they are dominated by a few reporters from TV networks and big newspapers. He said the Reagan Administration has “searched for a better way,” trying one-on-one interviews, six-on-one interviews and off-the-record cocktail sessions.

Another panelist, ABC White House correspondent Sam Donaldson, quickly protested, saying, “News conferences are the only chance the American public has to see Ronald Reagan use his mind.”

What the White House really wants is to keep Reagan under wraps for fear he will make a blunder or deviate from whatever policy point his staff is emphasizing that day, Donaldson said. That strategy “does not serve the American public,” he said.

Jack Nelson, Los Angeles Times White House correspondent, said there is “a real contempt for the press within the Reagan Administration and it starts at the top.”

Nelson said the White House’s controls on information are the tightest since the Watergate years of former President Richard Nixon.

Most previous administrations felt that the press had “a right to know things,” Donaldson said, but Reagan staffers feel that “they have the right to make those decisions about what the public knows.”

Jody Powell, press secretary to President Jimmy Carter, defended the attempts to manage what Reagan says.

“Presidents have this almost irresponsible urge to answer a question unless they’re physically restrained. . . ,” Powell said. “It does muck up your position of the day, even if he does get his facts right.”