President Bush has named Tony Snow as his new press secretary. But that won’t fix his press relations unless he changes his underlying philosophy.

To do so, both Bush and Snow might look at why Jody Powell, Marlin Fitzwater and Mike McCurry succeeded as presidential press secretaries.

All three served presidents who understood the job has two facets: to sell the president’s positions and help the White House press corps report and explain them.

They were loyal to their presidents and respected as knowledgeable sources of information.

To be sure, each clashed periodically with individual journalists, many of whom see their prime mission as holding the feet of the president and his representatives to the fire.

This White House has a fundamentally different view of press relations.

Rather than view reporters as a conduit through which to communicate with the public, it sees them as another special interest group seeking access for its own purposes. It sees a principal goal as keeping that from happening.

Mary Matalin, a longtime Republican operative who has advised Vice President Dick Cheney on communications strategy, made a revealing statement recently about the relationship between press secretary and press.

“It’s the hardest job in the White House,” she told the Chicago Tribune’s Mark Silva. “You’ve got to really stay in the lane, you’ve got to really stay focused on the message. … The press’ job is to write something different, and he can’t give them what they want. If he is successful at his job, it makes it harder for them to do their job.”

That reflects a philosophy that the press secretary’s main job is to keep the press from penetrating the veneer of the White House and telling what’s really going on. It overlooks the positive aspect – selling the president’s policies by helping the press understand them better.

That philosophy creates its own problems, as two revealing episodes from this White House show. In both, Bush laid out major policy changes, and the White House made no effort to facilitate understanding of them.

One was his June 2002 speech to the U.S. Military Academy’s commencement at West Point, in which he presented his contention that the United States can take pre-emptive action to prevent a potential adversary’s attack.

His speech foreshadowed the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There was no advance word that Bush would deliver an important speech that day and no press briefing to help reporters understand the policy’s details and significance.

The other was his second inaugural address Jan. 20, 2005, in which he declared that a major goal of U.S. foreign policy was to democratize the world. Again, he spoke without any advance sales job or briefing.

This caused so much confusion that his father, former President George H.W. Bush, made an unscheduled appearance in the White House Press Room to explain what the president intended to say.

If the lack of briefings and explanations means that the press doesn’t quite get the story right, the big loser isn’t the press. It’s the public, which, in the case of the democracy policy, might have wanted to know how it squares with continued U.S. support for virtual dictators such as Saudi King Abdullah or the president of Azerbaijan, who visits Bush on Friday.

Another loser is the White House, which is able to get a better sense of press and public concerns from reporters.

Since entering the White House, Bush has had two press secretaries.

The first, Ari Fleischer, was an aggressive combatant in the daily White House press briefings. His brusque manner created antagonism in the Press Room.

His successor, Scott McClellan, was less aggressive but also less knowledgeable and no more forthcoming in providing light along with a daily supply of heat.

In accepting his new job Wednesday, Snow told reporters he took it in part because “I want to work with you.”

Bush said the erstwhile Fox commentator’s assignment “is to help explain” presidential decisions “to the press corps and the American people.”

That sounds suspiciously like the same limited philosophy of press relations that has limited the success of his predecessors.

– Carl P. Leubsdorf is Washington bureau chief of the Dallas Morning News.