Want to sink deeper and deeper into a morass of gloom and despair? Just check out Politico's exhaustive survey of White House correspondents, which appears to conclusively prove that being a White House correspondent is the absolute worst.
(Yes, nitpickers, we know it is definitely not really the worst job to have, what with the nice salary, lack of hard manual labor and frequent world travel, but just work with us here for a second, OK?)
The site spoke to 61 White House veterans, and the results are simply depressing. Here are just some of the answers to the question "What most people don’t know about covering the White House is...":
"How much we cover out that is not important enough to publish."
"That it’s quite often best done by NOT covering the White House."
"The 95 percent of the job that you don’t see on camera is claustrophobic, frustrating, sleep-denying, life-shortening and probably a violation of the Geneva Conventions."
"It’s the worst beat in politics."
Yikes! Hopefully these people are seeing their therapists regularly. And the awfulness doesn't end there. Most White House reporters have never gotten an exclusive interview with President Obama, and 61 percent of them think the daily White House press briefings should be overhauled. 13 percent of them don't even think press secretary Jay Carney knows their names, and, on average, they think they know a paltry 34 percent of what's even going on inside the building. Sad!
As if to confirm that the White House beat is nothing but a hellscape designed to drive even the jolliest person into a spiral of misery, Yahoo's Olivier Knox published a look on Thursday about how the White House press office now spends time hassling reporters about tweets it doesn't like:
Reporters who regularly cover Obama have become familiar with seemingly out-of-the-blue emails or telephone calls from officials taking issue with their tweets — often thoughtfully and constructively, sometimes with obscenity-laced yelps of outrage.
Help!
Read the full survey here.