Word: press
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...popular narrative (popular among the press, anyway), the media found a tough, skeptical voice after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. It's fairer to say, though, that the public - faced with objective evidence of government failure - gave the media permission to find that voice. MSNBC, which fired liberal Phil Donahue in 2003 - after a network report called him a "difficult public face for NBC in a time of war" - now employs Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann...
...Obama team, meanwhile, seems to have learned from Bush about dealing with the press. During the campaign, Obama, like Bush, exercised tight message control, limited press availability and disregarded old-media courtship rituals. Incoming press secretary Robert Gibbs pointedly told the New York Times Magazine that Obama never sat down with the Washington Post editorial board. "You could go to Cedar Rapids and Waterloo [Iowa] and understand that people aren't reading the Washington Post...
Unlike the Bushies, the Obama folks bypass the press with a smile, not a sneer. But the notion that a new Administration has to "feed the beast" in the pressroom may no longer be true. Politically, Bush didn't much suffer from writing off the "reality based" media. (Historically, maybe; hence his last-minute media barnstorming of late...
Like Bush, Obama has ways of going around the press corps. Whereas Dick Cheney would call in to Rush Limbaugh, Obama posts weekly addresses on YouTube, and Gibbs answers questions via video on Change.gov This media strategy not only bypasses the "filter" (to replace it with the Administration's own filter), it also gives the audience a feeling of investment in the new Administration. Which makes you that much more of a buzz kill if you're the one second-guessing...
...media need to pick fights with Obama just to prove their relevance. But they will have to work all the harder to cover the Obama Administration for what it is and not just what their audience wants to hear. For all the controversy over whether the press has a political bias, just as insidious is the bias in favor of being liked - and keeping an audience. Amid all the change, this is one thing that stays the same...