New York Times notices that Obama totally manipulates the press

Wow. Who do you side with here? The Obama Administration, which is limiting press access and increasingly controlling how the president is presented in an obvious campaign of image control? Or the New York Times, which is complaining about it?

For the most part, I side with neither one, but if forced to choose, I will defend the Obama team only in the sense that nothing it is doing justifies the sorry end results we get from the Times and other bastions of the MSM. Let's examine the crux of the Times's complaint:

A photo of the Obamas hugging that was released on Election Day 2012 has become the world's most popular tweet on Twitter. A dressed-up version of Barack Obama's State of the Union speech, packed with charts and graphs, is huge on YouTube. A playful picture of the president cavorting with a 3-year-old in a Spiderman costume is a favorite online.

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It's all courtesy of the Obama image machine, serving up a stream of words, images and videos that invariably cast the president as commanding, 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.

There are a lot of reasons I don't much sympathize with the Times's complaint, but I'll boil them down to two. First, "bloopers and bobbles" are not news. Of course the White House puts out pictures of Obama when he's looking good. But it doesn't tell us anything important to see a photo of him tripping over his shoelaces or dripping mustard on his suit. That is the sort of trivia that the media gets excited about but carries no real news value of any kind. You can't blame the White House for wanting to avoid "bloopers and bobbles," but you can absolutely blame the allegedly serious media for wanting to report them. But here is the more serious issue: Not getting access to the president for a solo news conference or a sit-down interview does not prevent you from reporting in a substantive way on his policies and how they are affecting the nation. Where was the Times to tell us about the real effects of ObamaCare? What did the Times have to say about all the waste and ineffectiveness of the $862 billion "stimulus"? Why hasn't the Times made an issue of Democrats' refusal to pass a budget for four years? Where is all the Times's detailed reporting on the expansion of the regulatory state? You don't need an interview with the president to report on any of this, and you certainly don't need embarrassing pictures of him to help tell the story. Go get the facts. Sure it would be nice to have a quote from the president, but it's hardly necessary for you to do your job. Look, I think the entire political world is way too image-conscious, and in that respect I don't like the way the White House obsesses over pictures and the parsing of words. Other White Houses have done the same but this one does seem to take it to a high art form. But the proper response of the press is not to whine about image manipulation. It's to ignore it and report on substantive facts. The New York Times refuses to do that because, however much it may bug them that they can't get their one-on-one sit-down, their editorial mission is to serve as apologists for the Obama agenda. I guess it just bothers them that Obama accepts their help with such ingratitude. It can't be easy to be media lapdogs.