From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

An hour before President Bush strode into the White House East Room for last week's

primetime news conference, the press corps was gathered outside the press room

annex of the West Wing, waiting for the high sign to head across the lawn.

Then, says Bob Deans, Cox Newspapers Correspondent and President of the White House

Correspondents Association.

We were told you may as well come back in because we're going to call you out two by two

to take you over to the East Room.

The reporters complied.

And not a whole lot changed when the conference actually began.

President Bush used the occasion of only his second primetime Q&A in the two years of his presidency

to state and restate his determination to disarm Iraq.

He called on 18 reporters in a sequence predetermined by the White House and was often so evasive in his answers that when he offhandedly observed that the order of questioning was scripted, it seemed he was referring to the entire event, Bob Deans.

Unfortunately, I think that a lot of the audience, and the reason I know this is because I've probably gotten about two dozen emails from people all around the country, you know, chastising me and saying, you know, you guys are a bunch of lap dogs.

You sat there and let him go through with a scripted news conference. That's not what happened, but it's certainly, I can understand why people would have thought that.

Viewers heard a series of perfectly good, if perfunctory questions on the cost of an Iraq war,

on the Korean nuclear crisis, on why many NATO allies have a less alarmist interpretation of U.S. intelligence than we have,

and on the future of Saddam Hussein.

In one of the evening's rare follow-ups, a reporter

dissatisfied with President Bush's evasive answer to that question, Gainly tried again.

...