D.C. press in uproar over White House censorship of pool reports

I always find it difficult to choose a side in a pissing match between the Obama White House and the White House press corps. To whatever extent the media is jerked around by Obama's propagandists, it largely serves them right for their willingness to play that role themselves in almost every situation.

And it's hard to have any sympathy for them here because, even though the behavior of the White House is atrocious, the press made themselves vulnerable to it out of sheer laziness and utter lack of imagination in coming up with better ways to do their jobs. The basic issue is this: Most of the time, the entire White House press corps does not follow Obama's every move. Instead, a small group selected on a rotating basis follows him around and sends "pool reports" to the rest of the White House reporters, who are presumably sitting around somewhere doing crossword puzzles or reading the works of Karl Marx. The pool reporters write the reports and give them to the White House press office to disseminate to the rest of the reporters. This is where the trouble has started. Lately the White House press office has been refusing to send out the pool reports unless parts they don't like are removed. It's typically trivial stuff, such as a reference to a joke Obama told, but nonetheless it's the White House trying to control what the media report. The Daily Signal explains:

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The White House press corps has a long tradition of filing “pool” reports. The intent is largely practical: Rather than having every correspondent cover everything the president says or does, a smaller, rotating group is selected. That group then passes along the pertinent information from the day’s events. But now there is a catch. According to the Post, the Obama White House is requesting alterations to those reports and sometimes refusing to send them unless reporters remove information. Before a pool report is shared, it must be filtered through the White House press office. The White House is responsible for forwarding the information to the entire pool of more than a thousand journalists. “While the overwhelming majority of pool reports pass through the White House without delay or amendment,” the Post reports, “some have been flagged by the administration’s press staff, which has demanded changes as a condition of distributing them.”

Now clearly, the White House should not be trying to exercise any sort of censorship, no matter how trivial or innocuous, over what the press reports. But don't you see the problem here? Why rely on the White House press office to distribute the information to the rest of the media? Have they ever heard of e-mail? Google Groups? File transfer protocol? The thing that surprised me most about this story was not that the White House was trying to engage in censorship. I would fully expect that from this bunch. It was that the media actually depends on the White House to send out the reports. It never occurred to them that this would put them at the mercy of the very people who are eager to exercise control over what they say? If the D.C. press corps can't figure out how to share information amongst themselves without relying on the White House to perform distribution duties, it's hard to have any sympathy for them when they are subjected to censorship. Any minimally competent Internet user could show them how to work around that problem. But apparently they're as lazy in the way they distribute their reporting as they are in the reporting itself.