Interesting observations from a guy in a position to know:

President Barack Obama’s first presidential news conference was performed feebly by the once-ferocious White House press corps and shrewdly — if deceptively — by the president. In the six years I did communications on former President Ronald Reagan’s White House staff, I don’t recall a single news conference in which there were no follow-up questions, no challenges to anything the president had said recently, no assertions of fact that the president was challenged to deal with. In fact, I don’t remember former President Bill Clinton, either, ever getting a full 45-minute prime-time news conference pass.

One wonders how much of the media’s abjection before Obama comes from fear: Fear that as traditional media business models fail, revenue dwindles, and jobs disappear, that it will be important in the near future to be seen as being on the right side–meaning the winning side–of political disputes. With the Left pushing for a resurrection of the so-called Fairness Doctrine (and therefore federal censorship of conservative talk radio) and newspaper companies looking to government for financial support, we are at real risk of having government interfering with the media at levels not seen since Woodrow Wilson.