Monday, September 21, 2009

Shouldn't He Stop Talking So Much? It Would Be a New Strategy to Try.   [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

From Howard Kurtz:

The White House doesn't buy the notion that President Obama, who appeared on five talk shows Sunday and is heading next for David Letterman's couch, could be wearing out his welcome on the tube.

Sure, this is a president who has dissected basketball brackets on ESPN, gone for burgers with Brian Williams, showed Steve Kroft his swing set, dissed Kanye West (off the record) with CNBC and ordered a general to shave Stephen Colbert's head. By that standard, Obama's Sunday blitz was a mere throat-clearing that, as it turned out, produced little in the way of big news. And some journalists — even as they continue to clamor for access — say he is diluting the product.

"It's simple," explains White House communications director Anita Dunn. "In an increasingly fragmented audience that gets information from a number of different sources, putting a huge amount of his time behind one medium increases our ability to really break through and get a message out. The effect of one interview, given how rapidly the news environment moves, doesn't last as long as it used to."

The president could have made major headlines just by appearing on NBC's "Meet the Press" or CBS's "Face the Nation" or ABC's "This Week" or CNN's "State of the Union." (He threw in Univision's "Al Punto," or "To the Point," while notably excluding "Fox News Sunday.") So was the full Ginsburg — so named for the five-show sweep by Monica Lewinsky's lawyer William Ginsburg — really necessary?...

So did Obama score?

While the White House plan was for Obama to focus primarily on health care and Afghanistan, he broke no new ground on either subject, repeating points he has made many times. Some topics varied — "State of the Union" host John King asked about North Korea; "This Week" host George Stephanopoulos asked about the ACORN scandal — but the game plans were strikingly similar.

09/21 08:11 AMShare