Almost defiantly, the Huffington Post seized upon conservative Bill Bennett's assertion that the press is not "in love" with Obama. Nice try.Obama, by holding these regular press conferences, can be said to be keeping the people informed. In much the same way, Franklin Roosevelt sought to keep Americans informed with his less frequent fireside chats.
But those were different times. People seem to have had more patience during the Great Depression than they do today, even though the times were tougher. A few days ago, Jamie Lee Curtis wrote admiringly on Huffington Post about Michelle Obama's vegetable garden on the White House lawn.
"I want growth, healthy growth," she wrote. "Grassroots growth. Seeds planted and taking root in front of a hungry America. Give him time. Give them time. Give it all time. Yes we can. Wait and wonder."
She lamented "the shrinking of our news" but not the departure of "the greed, avarice, gluttony, grossness, selfishness, deceit and cruelty of the last eight years and beyond."
Perhaps it is easier to counsel the virtues of patience when one is a child of Hollywood stars, a reasonably accomplished actress herself and the wife of a man who is — nominally, at least — a British lord and a successful screenwriter, musician, actor and comedian.
It's tough to be patient when you can't be sure where the money for your rent or your health insurance or your next meal is coming from.
Nevertheless, some folks are quaffing that Kool-Aid.
As Walter Shapiro observes in The New Republic, "journalistic convention requires three events to justify a trend, but we are jumping the gun because, frankly, the networks are not likely to pre–empt their lucrative evening programming next month to give Obama a third chance to fail to make news at a news conference."
Even so, I'm inclined to think the networks will devote prime–time to the next Obama press conference — even if it means postponing the season finale of "American Idol."
I wonder, though, if anything substantive emerged from the press conference. Was there anything new?
Josh Gerstein reports, for Politico, that Obama attempted "to convince Americans that his budget and policy prescriptions are exactly what's needed to get [the] nation's economy back on track, despite criticism from both parties in Congress."
He also defended the president's response to the AIG bonuses. Obama, he wrote, "sought to temper some of the public anger over bonuses paid to employees at the failed insurance giant AIG — saying that while it's understandable, it shouldn't lead to punitive measures that stymie the economic recovery."
Gerstein quoted Obama — "This budget is inseparable from this recovery" — as an article of faith.
Acknowledging that an "eclectic and pre–determined list of presidential questioners ... reflects the breakdown of traditional media hierarchies," Shapiro writes that "perhaps Obama's boldest decision was to call on Jon Ward from the conservative Washington Times, but to ignore the Washington Post."
Ward's question dealt with Obama's recent decision to end the ban on federal funding for stem cell research. I'm not certain when I first became aware of Obama's intentions concerning funding for stem cell research, but I know I was aware of it before he took the oath of office. So that action was hardly a news flash, in my view. Nor would I consider responding to a question about it to be "bold."
"Obama fluently answered the questions, sometimes at considerable length," write John Harris and Jonathan Martin at Politico. "But his responses were typically variations on a single–word theme: Whatever."
Is "whatever" enough justification for a presidential policy? Many seem to think so.
"Over the past week, Obama has barnstormed the nation's televisions, with repeated town halls in California, a seat on Jay Leno's couch, a big 60 Minutes splash on Sunday, and now a prime–time press conference," observes Michael Scherer for TIME. "Even those who eschew politics have most likely seen a clip or two of their President in charge, projecting confidence, explaining that things will get better. And for the White House, that is the message that matters."
So why is it becoming a tough sell for many of Obama's devotees in the media? I think it has a lot to do with the instant gratification culture in which we live.
John Dickerson of Slate referred to that, albeit indirectly. "The president tires of people who want quick and easy answers," he writes, "a point that became abundantly clear when he snapped ever so slightly at CNN's Ed Henry, who pressed him on why he hadn't shown outrage about the AIG bonuses more quickly."
I grew up in the 1970s, when it took a couple of years for enough irrefutable evidence to accumulate to lead to the resignation of Richard Nixon. The lesson of that experience was not lost on me.
But I was dismayed, some 20 years later, when I found myself in a classroom instructing aspiring journalists, many of whom expected news stories to be resolved immediately — and exhibited a certain impatience when they were not.
And that was before the influence of the internet and the more pervasive presence of cable and satellite TV — both of which have fed the fallacious impression that others can do the job of gathering the news better than trained journalists.
Today, the Huffington Post is reporting that a Rasmussen survey indicates that about one-third of Americans under the age of 40 believe that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are replacing traditional news outlets.
These men are intelligent and articulate. They may even have some insights into news events. But they are not — I repeat, not — trained news gatherers.
By the time our Kool–Aid–logged culture realizes that, it will be too late.
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