npr:

For five years, Beck Dorey-Stein was Barack Obama’s “professional stalker,” she says. “His creeper.”

As a former White House stenographer — a job she found on Craigslist of all places — Dorey-Stein was part of a team responsible for going anywhere the president would go, recording his every public utterance and then transcribing it for posterity.

“Especially whenever he spoke with press, he made sure, just like the previous presidents did, that there was a stenographer in the room so that there was no miscommunication or confusion about what exactly was said,” says Dorey-Stein. She writes about the experience in her new memoir, From the Corner of the Oval.

In an interview with Noel King for NPR’s Morning Edition, Dorey-Stein says “everything changed” with the inauguration of President Trump, whose team “didn’t know that stenographers existed.” She recounts how during the transition, it took her boss multiple tries before she was even able to get past a young press wrangler to introduce herself to the incoming West Wing staff.

Things didn’t improve much from there. In a New York Times op-ed published last week, Dorey-Stein writes about how Stephanie Grisham, now the communications director for the first lady, told a colleague that White House stenographers would not be needed often, because “there would be video.”

“This seems like a fair point,” says Dorey-Stein, “unless you really know audio.” The audio that’s taken from media video might change or get trimmed during the editing process, she says. “We see that with music videos, so the idea of it just being like, ‘Oh, of course, we can just have this on video,’ it’s not the same.”

Ex-White House Stenographer: With No Official Transcript, Trump Can Muddle The Truth

Photo: Saul Loe/AFP/Getty Images
Caption: Beck Dorey-Stein, a former White House stenographer, walks with members of the White House press pool from Air Force One upon arrival at Wattay International Airport in Laos on Sept. 7, 2016.