A playful picture of the president cavorting with a 3-year-old in a Spiderman costume is a favorite online.
It’s all courtesy of the Obama image machine, serving up a stream of
words, images and videos that invariably cast the president as compassionate and on the ball. In this world, Obama’s family is
always photogenic, first dog Bo is always well-behaved and the
vegetables in the South Lawn kitchen garden always seem succulent.
You’ll have to look elsewhere for bloopers, bobbles or contrary points of view. Capitalizing on the possibilities of the digital age, the Obama White
House is generating its own content like no president before, and
refining its media strategies in the second term in hopes of telling a
more compelling story than in the first.
At the same time, it is limiting press access in ways that past
administrations wouldn’t have dared, and the president is answering to
the public in more controlled settings than his predecessors. It’s
raising new questions about what’s lost when the White House tries to
make an end run around the media, functioning, in effect, as its own
news agency.
Mike McCurry, who served as press secretary to President Bill
Clinton, sees an inclination by the Obama White House to “self-publish,”
coupled with tactics “I never would have dreamed of in terms of
restricting access” for independent news organizations.
“What gets lost are those revealing moments when the president’s held
accountable by the representatives of the public who are there in the
form of the media,” says McCurry. (Full Story at CBS)
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