This is the second in a series of occasional posts about the nitty gritty of working in the West Wing of the White House. I am describing things as they were in the Bush Administration. YMMV in the Obama Administration. Again, it seems a bit silly to write about such trivial details, but given the positive feedback on the first post in this series, here goes.

I did my first TV interview at the beginning of 2008 shortly after being promoted. At first it was stressful, and it took me a while to get used to it. Now that I’m on the outside, I do an occasional interview on CNBC, Fox, or CNN. Today I’d like to describe the mechanics of doing a TV news interview from the North Lawn of the White House. Even though I had worked in the White House for more than five years before my first on-camera interview, I did not know any of this until I actually had to do it.

Today is Jobs Day: the first Friday of the month, when the Labor Department releases the monthly employment report. The employment report is generally the most important economic data point of the month, and the business news channels (CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business) always cover it. They always ask for someone from the Administration to comment on the data and what it means for the economy and the policy agenda. I see the Vice President’s economic advisor, Jared Bernstein, is doing CNBC now. In 2008, CEA Chairman Dr. Ed Lazear and I typically did this duty.

The jobs report is released at 8:30 AM on Friday. As with all economic data releases, Administration officials are embargoed from talking about it publicly for one hour after the release. This gives the markets time to process the data without the Administration’s viewpoint.

For each show broadcasting at 9:30 AM, a network producer negotiates with a staffer in the White House press shop. For us it was Eryn Witcher, a top-notch professional with prior experience in TV news who now works as the communications director at Stanford’s Hoover Institute. Eryn would negotiate with the producers and set Ed and/or me up with interviews.

Ed and I would talk the night before about the upcoming data and what we might say about it on the air. We were among a handful of officials who got the data reports before they were […]