shakran

It's not that the media is afraid of Bush. It's afraid of not getting interviews with him ever again. In the corporate world that is today's media, ratings mean everything. Now, picture a scenario where, say, NBC pisses Bush off and Bush decides he won't talk to NBC again, but ABC and CBS have been lobbing softball questions. Bush will still talk to ABC and CBS, but NBC never has the president beign interviewed by them again. The fear is that the public will switch over to ABC and CBS because, hey, THEY'RE covering the president and NBC is not.

I personally think that's stupid. First I give the viewers more credit than that. Second, I don't think any president would have the balls to turn down one of the networks. He'll act like he would, but. . . If NBC runs a story about something Bush has done, and Bush refuses to comment, and NBC says "we tried to talk to the president but he refused to talk to us about this issue." then that only makes the president look bad. Makes him look like he's trying to bury the issue and in the mind of John Q. Voter, why on earth would he do that unless there was something nasty about it that Bush doesn't want us to know?

And jwoody, it depends on the president. This one has been remarkeably inaccessible to the media. He doesn't generally appear before Congress unless it's a state of the union address (at which time the protocol is that the senators/representatives can't ask him questions anyway), and he is only rarely trotted out for reporters to talk to - usually only when his numbers are in the toilet and one of his handlers smells a specific benefit to doing so.

He's also rather famous for trying to direct how interviews will go - you may have seen the incident where he got into it with an Irish reporter because the Irish reporter had the unmitigated gall to ask him questions and expect answers rather than mumbling evasions.