COLUMN ONE : The Media: Bush Plays It Cozy : His casual, friendly approach has revived the presidential press conference. Ironically, he may be cutting himself off from the public.

It was Nov. 7, a year since his election, and George Bush wanted to take advantage of the moment.

So he turned, naturally, to what has become the most effective communication tool of his young presidency.

He held a news conference--his 28th in 11 months.

“Well, good morning. And I’m back again,” the President began, generating warm laughter from reporters.

“I just heard you, Brit,” he said, kidding ABC correspondent Brit Hume, who had whispered something to a colleague.

“I’ve got to be careful on these dates,” he continued, getting another laugh. The President is well known for muffing his dates. “Today is Nov. 7 . . . .”

The atmosphere is genial, the jokes inside humor. It is 10:49 in the morning. Most Americans aren’t even watching. But, in his own way, George Bush has resuscitated the presidential press conference.

Ever since John F. Kennedy started televising them live, presidential news conferences have suffered three decades of decline. They have tended to become staged performances, infrequently held--the President in combat with reporters--and even the press doubted their usefulness.

Bush has reversed that decline. The news conference is the centerpiece of his media strategy, and it offers special insight into the peculiar nature of the Bush presidency:

--Most of Bush’s news conferences are rambling sessions, held without warning, reflecting the President’s penchant for informal, unpressured settings.

--Most have no single message, reflecting Bush’s low-risk diversified approach.

--They are built around what Bush considers his greatest political asset--face-to-face, personal contact.

--And most are aimed, not at television, but at newspapers.

As Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen put it, this is “a newspaper President in a television age.”

To the extent that the public gets a message from these sessions, it is a simple one: things are OK, Bush is on top of the situation--the executive reassuring the stockholders.

Some, such as former President Ronald Reagan’s former adviser Michael K. Deaver, think there may be risks in this approach. If Bush has no strong link directly to the public, will he have the support to weather the inevitable squalls, as Reagan did the Iran-Contra scandal?

Others worry that reporters are being taken in by all the access they are being given.

But, in the meantime, Bush is maintaining a popularity rating of more than 60% almost without appearing regularly on television news.

In his first three months in office, Bush appeared on the nightly network news about half as often as Ronald Reagan or Jimmy Carter. Since then, between August and October, his appearances have dropped by 33%, and the references to him have turned increasingly negative. These are part of the findings of a study to be published later this month by the Center for Media and Public Affairs.

Bush’s press strategy and the revival of the news conference evolved from two meetings Bush and White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater had last December. In part, the President wanted to shed the stage-managed image of both his own campaign and the Reagan era.

The press strategy Fitzwater outlined as a result in a private memo for Bush was a hybrid of Roger Ailes’ theory that “the man is the message” and the age-old theory of press management: “Be good to the press and they’ll be good to you.”

The key was frequent face-to-face contact with reporters in the kind of informal settings where Bush performed best--off the record lunches, over drinks, jogging, playing horseshoes. As for news conferences, Fitzwater adopted recommendations of a recent Harvard study that called for the President to depressurize the sessions by holding them more regularly, often during the day, in the briefing room, and to meet often with smaller groups of reporters.

This would please the press corps. “The more often the press talk to him directly, the better off they feel the situation is,” Fitzwater explained, and this would “give an advantage to the White House press corps who, after all, devote their lives to covering him.”

The strategy also fit Bush. In particular, Fitzwater wanted the press conferences to resemble an old campaign forum called “Ask George Bush,” a friendly, casual town meeting in which Bush sat on a stool in the middle of a room and took questions.

“The Bush sense of humor is the kind that bounces off people,” Fitzwater said. “He doesn’t tell stories. But he kids people. (And) he can take kidding.”

To approximate this lighthearted, no-pressure atmosphere, Fitzwater decided to make the first news conference a total surprise. “Just walk into the briefing room, no warning,” he said--except for the half hour or so it would take to alert the reporters and the cameras.

No warning meant that there were no expectations for Bush to live up to, no carefully prepared questions and less chance of another Bush problem: getting nervous and freezing up on TV.

It worked like a dream. This was a friendly, open President in command of detail, answering all questions.

Press conferences since then have nearly all been spontaneous, as have many of the social invitations to reporters. In all, Bush has now had 30 press conferences--nearly three a month--and most of them in the morning, when only CNN puts them on the air.

That alone is a stark departure from the press strategy Deaver used for Reagan. “The Deaver argument was that if you do afternoon informal press conferences the networks get to pick what they run,” Fitzwater said. “If you do it at night, you get to say whatever you want to the whole audience.”

But Fitzwater is convinced that “the message you want to give” is usually about the most newsworthy event of the day, so the networks will cover it anyway without all the pressure and hoopla of prime time.

Even Deaver admits now that “so much came to weigh on that event, a President could cause news for a week” by what he said or didn’t say at a press conference. “By de-emphasizing it, taking away the production attitude, Bush has maybe taken that possible threat or trap away.”

But the change really is deeper. After John Kennedy started allowing television to carry press conferences live, they became a forum to bypass the press altogether and speak directly to the American people. In effect, the press corps became a prop. The American public got to watch how their President handled those media bullies.

Scholars have seen the trend continue and reach its zenith under Reagan. Even White House spokesman Larry Speakes said in 1986 that news conferences had “outlived their usefulness.”

Bush has revived them by returning to their pre-television purpose. He is talking to the press, not over it, and especially to the print press. In an impromptu news conference he held in the Oval Office shortly before the Malta summit meeting, for instance, Bush even had his back to the camera.

“That is incredible,” a mystified Deaver said.

This President will also make news on several subjects in the same news conference--and usually comes without any prepared statement--again violating a Deaver principle of having a single message of the day.

Much of the purpose of Bush’s news conferences, White House officials admit, is simply to avoid antagonism building up. “Every week or so,” Fitzwater said, the President will say to me, ‘Is there any pressure building out there? Let’s go out and have a press conference and relieve the pressure.’ ”

The only prime-time, prearranged and network televised press conference that Bush did have, the White House considers a disaster.

Bush’s humor and easy personality didn’t work “in the big East Room,” Fitzwater said, where the “space and cameras and setting” made everything too large and formal.

If that means Bush is a print President, Fitzwater is pleased. “I know there are studies (showing) most people get their news from TV,” he said, “but I just think the print press is most crucial.”

But the reasons may go beyond media strategy.

“He is not a guy who sees his relationship with the American people as a major source of power,” said William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute. “He depends on his ability to develop personal relationships and make deals--with foreign leaders, with Congress, even with the press. And that audience he can reach without television.

“All you can communicate with TV is themes,” Schneider said. “But, if you want to make deals with people, you have to look at the contract. You have to read it.”

Even Deaver agrees that Bush “is very much a Beltway person, very much a Washington animal . . . . Reagan never felt that comfort, and the audience he wanted to talk to was the American people.”

The impression the public derives from Bush’s news conferences is only a general one. “He communicates that everything is under control, which for him is critical,” Schneider said.

Some wonder if this is also Bush’s limitation. “A time will come when he will have to go over the heads of this town and go directly to the American people,” Deaver said.

“When the world events are swirling, as they are now, it can be very helpful to the country to have the American view put in perspective,” said David Gergen, a former White House communications director and now editor at large of U.S. News & World Report.

And Deaver added: “I don’t think there is such a thing any more as a print presidency.”

Bush did run into problems when the Berlin Wall came down. After what ABC correspondent Brit Hume called an “out of sorts” response to reporters in the Oval office, again with his back to the camera, Bush felt compelled to make events in Eastern Europe the focus of a prime-time speech--only the second he has given--shortly before Thanksgiving.

Other observers, such as Bill Kovach, curator of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard, worry that Bush’s face-to-face strategy “has set a tone that puts journalists on the defensive.”

They fear that news conferences have become so genial that an antagonistic question by a reporter might seem gauche. It is manipulation by manners.

“It is true,” Fitzwater said, “that the fact that he is available often tends to relieve the kind of personal animosity that in turn leads to tough questions. Or not tough questions but uncivil questions, if you will.”

But he insists tough questions are still being asked, only in more polite ways.

There is some evidence, however, that Bush instinctively does see frequent contact with the press as a way of winning it over.

He even surprised some White House reporters early last month when he told them that he wanted to enlist their help in pushing his struggling legislative agenda.

He wanted, he said, “to urge you people to join me in calling out for congressional action.” It was time for an “editorial pounding” to get Congress to “support the President as he tries to move this country forward.”

Did he really believe, a follow-up questioner asked, that the press corps would carry his message for him.

Frankly, yes. “I mean, come on. You’ll get on me when I do stuff wrong,” he said. “Get on them.”

The sense of the press corps as part of the White House team is even reflected in Bush’s plans for the President’s annual Christmas party for the press. Rather than have a separate party for reporters, as in the past, he is inviting them to the series of parties he has for his staff. The access is helpful. It is also flattering.

“The danger is not the civility of a press conference but all of this business of come up to the family quarters and come out jogging,” said former ABC White House correspondent Sam Donaldson.

At least one reporter who has enjoyed those invitations agrees that they are heady stuff. Unfailingly, the visits are followed a couple of weeks later by a photo in the mail of the reporter and the President together.

And the reporter believes Bush is getting the better of it. “There is now fairly consistent and growing criticism from outside, and I haven’t yet seen that reflected in any substantial way in the coverage.”

But others scoff. The notion that there is something nefarious in reviving the press conference is crazy, said Hodding Carter, the journalist and former State Department spokesman during the Jimmy Carter Administration. “The news business is filled with hypocrites, paranoids and utterly maddened folks. This is exactly what everybody has wanted press conferences and press relations to be like . . . . It’s wonderful. So he is playing to his strength. He is actually playing to our strength.”

It is only the reporter who is “a moral coward,” Carter said, who will be taken in.

Closeness with the press corps may be the concern when Bush’s popularity rating is high, but most who follow politics wonder whether he will be willing to face reporters so often when events are not breaking to his advantage.

“I applaud the manner in which he has addressed the problem,” said Marvin Kalb, director of the Shorenstein Barone Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard and one of the authors of the study on news conferences that Fitzwater followed. But “we’ll know when things get really bad, when suddenly the number of appearances begin to drop.”

That drop-off in the number of meetings with the press has been the pattern among presidents for 70 years now, from Woodrow Wilson--who many believe started presidential press conferences--to Ronald Reagan.

Ray Scherer, a former NBC White House correspondent, has seen many presidents come and go. He puts it simply: “The grievances always build up.”