Peter Baker of NYT posted tonight an appraisal of how Obama is using the new media, which lessens influence of the old. He takes questions from bloggers, via YouTube and even from Republicans but has not had a full-scale press conference with WH reporters for seven months--a recent record.After a year in office, Mr. Obama has managed to do what every modern president may have wanted to do but never did: effectively shut out the reporters who work just a few feet from the Oval Office. He has not had a full-scale White House news conference in seven months, the longest such stretch by any president in a decade. And he has made a practice of not taking reporters’ questions at day-to-day events, as other presidents did.
None of that means that Mr. Obama has shielded himself from public scrutiny. But he has fundamentally altered the way a president deals with the news media. Instead of open-ended sessions with multiple reporters, he prefers one-on-one interviews, particularly with television anchors. He gives far more interviews than his two most recent predecessors did, reflecting the conclusion that the format is a more effective means for getting his message through.
Let me see if I've got this straight. After his last news conference, network executives were bitching about how much he was cutting into prime time revenues by having too many news conferences too frequently and making noises about him being "overexposed" and not liking him using their airtime to push his agenda and maybe not running the next one. And now they're bitching because he listened to their bitching? Seriously?
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