But over the last week Mr. Carney — the first reporter in a generation to move to the other side of the White House podium — has made his most emphatic and inextricable leap from reporter to reported on.
Cornered by a number of controversies — one of which swept in his own words — Mr. Carney has chalked up the criticism over the handling of the attack on an American mission in Benghazi, Libya, to partisan beefing, cast a tiny shadow of doubt on the I.R.S.’s targeting of conservatives, and defended the administration over its seizure of reporters’ phone records.
In so doing, Mr. Carney, 47, has fully embraced the sort of semantic jujitsu that might have made his reporter self choleric, “appreciating” tough questions, dodging others as “wholly inappropriate” to answer, boasting about an “unfettered” respect for the press that was being spied upon, and generally splitting hairs, obfuscating and testing his turbulent ties with the members of his former tribe.
If the incoming mortar fire is leaving wounds, Mr. Carney, the bespectacled, baby-faced press warrior, does not feel them. “Honestly, I find it enjoyable,” Mr. Carney said. “I find it challenging. It’s hard, but it’s better than 45 to 60 minutes of calling on reporters who are kind of sleepy and disinterested. For me personally, it has been a good week.”
The pressures began two weeks ago with the growing controversy over the attack last Sept. 11 on the American Consulate in Benghazi, in which four Americans were killed.
Mr. Carney is far from the center of that controversy. But Republicans turned their focus on his November assertion that the administration’s original talking points on the episode “originated from the intelligence community” and that the White House edited only a couple of words in the memo.
Recently revealed e-mails demonstrate a more coordinated process in which the White House and State Department were intimately involved. While Mr. Carney “appreciated” the questions about the inconsistencies, he did little to clear them up.
“The downside for Jay on this is his own repeated statements are cast under a considerable cloud,” said Ann Compton of ABC News, who has covered the White House since 1974. “The flip side is he does not appear to be a policy voice arguing on behalf of fuzzing up the facts.”
The tensions continued with Mr. Carney’s defense of the White House in the investigation over whether the I.R.S. inappropriately targeted conservative groups for special scrutiny and his push back on questions relating to the the seizure of telephone records of Associated Press journalists, over which the press relentlessly grilled him.
“I don’t take it personally,” he said of the tough questions lobbed by his former peers.
Mr. Carney is the first full-time reporter to make the jump to the White House since Ron Nessen, a former NBC News correspondent, served as press secretary for President Gerald R. Ford. (Tony Snow, a press secretary for President George W. Bush, worked as an opinion writer and anchor.)
His role as President Obama’s chief spokesman was not entirely foretold by his earlier life or career choices. One of three children, he grew up in Northern Virginia and earned a degree in Russian studies from Yale. He began his reporting career at The Miami Herald and became Time magazine’s Miami bureau chief in 1988. He then was assigned to the magazine’s Moscow bureau, in 1990, which he said was a career highlight.
After returning to Washington in 1993, and except for a two-year stint on Capitol Hill, he reported on presidential campaigns and the White House, and served as Time’s Washington bureau chief, before leaving the profession.
In 2008, Mr. Carney was still at Time, which, like many mainstream news publications was bleeding cash and staff.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/18/us/politics/reporter-turned-white-house-spokesman-enjoys-the-hot-seat.html?partner=rss&emc=rss