if he's not going to come by anymore, why not bring back FDR's pool, or put up a parking lot?
Sure, I know it's not a race, but I did beat (scooped?) the Times again, although by only slightly less than a week this time: Obama hasn't held a press conference since July, as I wrote here. However if you read this story by Peter Baker in the Times today you'll get the impression that it only means that our current President is being hip, that he's found a better way.
What he's found, the article tells us, is a media strategy that works for the White House. Baker doesn't bother to address whether it works for his own profession, or for the public, whose only window onto the doings of our so-called representative government is a vigilant, independent press.
I'm certainly anything but a part of MSM, but it doesn't make me feel any better about this president's relationship to the press to be told that he has a more generous understanding of what constitutes "the press" than did his predecessors. Obama may be, as the Times headline puts it, "taking questions", from other than the wire service, print and broadcast reporters who work inside the White House, but he's doing it on his terms, and those terms have been dictated to us.
Addressing "alternative" media alone does not satisfy the public's need (and a free republic's requisite) to see that reporters of all kinds are able to freely ask their own questions, not those induced by an officeholder, and in a forum and at a time not engineered by that same public servant.
[image of the renovated James S. Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House from visitingdc]