BROOKE GLADSTONE: We're back with On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.


BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. When presidential joyrider George W. Bush tail-hooked onto the carrier U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln recently, much was made of the stage management behind his dramatic high-seas landing in which presidential security took a back seat to presidential image.

Elisabeth Bumiller, White House correspondent for the New York Times, recently chronicled the many ways this administration has crafted presidential must-see TV. She joins me now. Elisabeth, welcome to the program.


ELISABETH BUMILLER: Thank you. Glad to be here.


BOB GARFIELD: All right, let's begin with the aircraft carrier landing earlier this month because it so infuriated so many people. But you've been watching the PR handling of this president for a while now. Were you surprised by the so-called "top gun" event?


ELISABETH BUMILLER: In our news room at the Times they were saying my God! -- this is the biggest spectacle of presidential theatre we've ever seen. If you have been watching the Bush White House for the last 2 years you can see in some ways that they were really building up to it. They haven't, you know, invented the wheel here. They have just added on to a lot of -- if you can call them White House tricks and, and methods of staging the president that's been going on since Ronald Reagan, really.


BOB GARFIELD: I guess the jury is out and will remain out until history judges whether President Bush was a good or a bad president, but we don't have to wait to determine that he is probably the best-lighted president who ever served in the White House.
[LAUGHTER]
Tell me about the Musco Lights.


ELISABETH BUMILLER: [LAUGHS] I guess you could say that. Musco Lights are the giant sort of Kleig Lights you see at movie premieres and at outdoor sporting events, sports stadiums, rock concerts and for a couple of really big events the White House rented these lights at a cost that I could not determine and used them to do some pretty dramatic stuff.

The main thing that people remember in America was on the one year anniversary of September 11th President Bush gave a speech on Ellis Island and the White House had gone so far as to rent three sets of Musco Lights which they set down on a barge across New York harbor and tethered in the water around the base of Liberty Island and then sort of blasted them upward and lit up the Statue of Liberty in a huge, fabulous way so it could be seen on television.


BOB GARFIELD: You mentioned the Reagan administration. Michael Deaver was widely credited with turning the routine business of making the president look good into a sort of high art. But even he has looked with admiration at the work of the current administration. Who are the people behind the scenes who are making President Bush look so presidential?


ELISABETH BUMILLER: I guess you could call them "Deaver's Children." Interestingly all of them have previous network television experience. The first among equals is a young man named Scott Sforza who used to be a producer at ABC.

There's another guy named Bob DeServi. He was an NBC cameraman during the 2000 Bush campaign. The Bush people liked his work so much that he was hired when this administration began to do all the lighting for President Bush.

There is a new guy who's head of the presidential advance team. Presidential advance is the group of people that sets up all the presidential events 2, 3, 4 or 5 days ahead of time. He was a producer for Fox News.

So they hired some of the best in the business, and what's interesting is that this is all technical, a lot of it, but it turns out that making the president look really good does come down many days to camera angles and lighting and staging and backdrops.


BOB GARFIELD: What about the subtle and not so subtle altering of reality? There was a speech in Indianapolis in which the president was trying to demonstrate that his proposed tax cuts would benefit the working man.


ELISABETH BUMILLER: There was a report on a local television station in Indianapolis where local Republican leaders told the television reporter that the White House people had asked some of the Republican officials sitting behind the president who would be seen on television to remove their ties, and the idea was they didn't want it to look formal -- that they wanted the people to look you know more like ordinary folk who might be benefitting from the president's tax cut, or so the president was saying.


BOB GARFIELD: At some point -- maybe I'm just over-sensitive -- doesn't this take on a sort of Leni Riefenstahl echo to it -- the documentation of the heroism of the reich -- as some point doesn't it get close to just too much?


ELISABETH BUMILLER: I don't perhaps think it's as dangerous as you think it is. I just think it's American politics. To be a successful politician you have to be good on television. We've known that for many decades now.


BOB GARFIELD: No, see I wouldn't say dangerous -- I would just say vaguely creepy -- at taxpayer expense.


ELISABETH BUMILLER: Well I'm [LAUGHS] not going to say that. I, I don't know -- what is the alternative? If you're the president, you know, and you're going to be on television, they gotta shine a light on you, because otherwise you're not going to be seen. Where would you draw the line? Do you not do a stage for the president? You know, I don't know where the line is!


BOB GARFIELD: You know, I don't know where the line is either, but I have a sneaking suspicion
[LAUGHTER]
that somewhere -- maybe in this presidency --and maybe in the last one -- it has been crossed. Elisabeth Bumiller, thanks very much.


ELISABETH BUMILLER: Thank you.


BOB GARFIELD: Elisabeth Bumiller covers the White House for the New York Times.