How Obama plays the media game

When Obama appeared on Letterman as the show's only guest, he took a page from the George Bush playbook and bypassed the media to deliver his messages unfiltered and without pesky criticism, sort of like when Dick Chenney appears on Fox.

You could argue that he is diluting his premium brand by appearing on so many talks shows after he also blanketed the Sunday morning talking head panels, but he rightly thinks passing healthcare will define the next three years of his presidency. (Well, healthcare and the economy stupid.)

He also decided to take on Fox News. Figuring he has little to gain by playing nice, Obama declared war on the network, arguing the network's opinion makers rarely side with him on the issues of the day. In the Obama calculation, it was safer to call Fox News the opposition party megaphone rather a vendor of fair and balanced news. Shooting the messenger never gets old in Washington and the administration decided Fox's audience wasn't going to vote democratic in the next election anyway.

The next election cycle will tell us if Obama should have used a bigger carrot instead of the stick when dealing with Fox News.

Why newspapers matter and a pop quiz

If you have a chance, please read this excerpt on why we need newspapers. At a time when more people than ever turn to newspapers for information, the industry's economic model is crumbling, and its overall health is declining. In a speech before the Joint Economic Committee, the Director for the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism, Tom Rosenstiel, noted:

Last year, the traffic to the top 50 news websites grew by 27%. But the price of an online ad fell by 48%.

The consequence is that the amount of our civic life that occurs in the sunlight of observation by journalists is shrinking. The number of city councils and zoning commissions, utility boards and state houses, governor's mansions and world capitals being covered on a regular basis, even by a lone journalist, is diminishing. One out of every five people working in newspaper newsrooms in 2000 was gone at the beginning of 2009, and the number is doubtless higher now. My old newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, has half the reporters it did a decade ago.

In a nutshell, while more people are reading the news, fewer people are reporting it. In a democracy, someone needs to ferret out the truth, if only for the populace to have an informed opinion.

If you think we have an informed populace, take this quiz and compare your answers with the nation at large and let me know how you feel about the depth of our collective knowledge.