My old friend and colleague, Tony Snow, got off to a “rocky start,” according to the Associated Press. Added the New York Times: “Press Secretary’s First Gaggle: ‘Just a Mess.'”

A “gaggle,” for those of you unversed in Beltway lingo, an off-camera meeting between reporters and the White House press secretary. Until Sept. 11, gaggles were usually held in the press secretary’s office. Snow, who is George W. Bush’s new press secretary (and a former editorial writer for The Detroit News), decided to revive the practice, assuming reporters would appreciate the more intimate, informal format.

Wrong. The reigning story line inside the Beltway is that this is an incompetent administration (when it’s not being brilliantly evil). Thus when more reporters showed up than Snow’s office could handle – with the crowd spilling out into the corridor – the pack rushed to invoke the “I” word. Never mind that Tony had apologized for failing to anticipate that there would be “just a mess” – his own words – if everybody showed up, which has never happened before.

And that was before several reporters got on his case for answering several (thoroughly routine) questions before everybody had showed up. Tony apologized again, but obviously he wasn’t getting it. A press secretary daring to answer other reporters’ questions when asked? How incompetent can a spokesman be?

All of which confirms me in my belief that I left the right message on Tony’s message machine when the announcement went out several weeks ago that he had taken the job as spokesman. “My condolences,” I started off. Since Watergate, after all, a “failed presidency” has become the holy grail of journalism – and here was a man whose job it would be to get between the gaggle and its story line.

Bush’s low poll numbers have the mainstream media smelling serious blood. Tony’s “rocky start” fit the story line. Every negative event will be seen, fairly or unfairly, as yet more evidence that the mandate of heaven is slipping from this administration’s hands. It probably didn’t help that even before Tony held his first official gaggle that his office had emailed several news organizations, including the Associated Press and CBS News, to complain about what it called “unfair” coverage on several stories, according to a story in the Washington Examiner.

The media is good at dishing it out. It has a very thin skin when it gets criticized.

Nothing Tony can do is likely to change the media’s determination to chase the “failed presidency” story. It happens even to presidents who turn out to be judged successful. When the stock market plummeted a breathtaking 23 percent in one day in 1987, for example, the mainstream press gleefully pounced on it as evidence that what it had been saying all along about Ronald Reagan was true: He was nothing more than a dopey actor from Hollywood whose tax cuts were creating huge deficits that would lead to disaster.

Alas for the media and its story line, the market bounced back within a year, the economic boom of the 1980s resumed and Reagan finished out his second term with high approval ratings. The crash had in fact been triggered by the sort of fiddling with monetary policy that many liberals (and businessmen from Detroit) are now urging on the Bush administration, not tax policy. (Though critics are once again predicting disaster because of the tax policies of the supposedly dopey man from Crawford, despite record revenue increases in the last two years.)

In truth, presidents, and particularly Republican presidents, have always had a tough job with the media. It’s the job of the press, after all, to keep a sharp eye on government. But when you add in media hostility to conservative ideas, the relationship moves from adversarial to destructive. A personal apology for a minor inconvenience, motivated by an effort to reach out to the media, becomes a peg for nasty little digs on the front sections.

As Harry Truman famously remarked, if you want a friend in Washington, get a dog. As it happens the Snow family has always had lots of animals around the house. Maybe Tony, a talented man, can find a way to break up the ice dams forming between the media and his boss. But he should be sure to keep the dog.

Mr. Bray writes columns for The Detroit News andRealClearPolitics.com.