“Surely the Sanford story has many tragic dimensions, but was it really the most important story last week to justify the sort of coverage it got on CNN and MSNBC?” Goldstein wonders.
“For my money, the Senate's cloture vote on Harold Koh's nomination, Iran, health care, Korean threats, etc., will have more impact on our lives than the fact that yet another ‘family values’ politician has acted in a manner which is inconsistent with what he preaches.”
Villanova University’s Lara Brown offers two reasons why this particular press conference is just the beginning of what we can expect between the press and the president: Obama’s slipping popularity numbers, and the roughing-up of his policies on Capitol Hill.
Obama and his staff, she says, may be increasingly concerned about too many substantive questions from reporters who may smell blood.
Perhaps it is not so surprising that Team Obama might create a diversion at a press conference, to get everyone talking about the diversion instead of reporting on substantive issues – health care, energy, the economy, the budget deficit, Iran, the president's lack of engagement on many of these issues – that do not reflect well on Obama.
It’s a political strategy that can be summed up as “Look at my right hand, so you don't watch what my left one is doing.”
Remember that old song, “Smooth Operator?” Obama is just that – the smoothest operator that Purdue’s Rockman says he has ever seen.
While such tricks may not jeopardize a free press, Rockman is “worried about the decline of traditional media and reporters without axes to bear.
“There is no doubt that the ‘new media’ is actually leading us back to a 19th-century party-press, where we read only what we agree with,” he says. And that “is a genuine concern.”
Since last week’s press conference, three things have emerged that will probably change how Obama approaches a microphone.
First, there definitely will be more scrutiny of blogger questions from Obama-friendly websites. Second, since first-blood has been drawn, the press will engage in a frenzied feeding.
And third, that probably was the last time Obama will step to the podium without real news to take queries about.