White House press secretary fresh off a gripe session with reporters on Thursday told Howard Kurtz yesterday that the press corps. seems more interested in camera time than actually reporting.

From the Politico

Press secretary Robert Gibbs chided the White House press corps Sunday, saying that some of its members are more interested in camera time than reporting.

 

“I wonder at times what it would be like” at his daily briefings “if we turned the cameras off, and we could just have a discussion,” Gibbs said on CNN’s “Reliable Sources,” likening the events to a “cable TV show.”

 

“I sometimes joke that I know when somebody thinks they have a good question, because when I walk in they’ve already got their makeup on.”

 

Responding to repeated questions from host Howard Kurtz about why Obama has held no press conferences since July 2009, Gibbs seemed to dismiss their relevance, calling it “an arbitrary Washington measure” of the president’s accessibility. “This president has taken questions through countless interviews through – answering questions directly from the media,” Gibbs said.

 

While more broadly expressing frustration with press coverage, Gibbs singled out Fox, saying that while the administration understands the need to “play the game” by giving the network access, it has a definitive “slant” in its coverage, including its news programs, and that it caters to a viewership that’s already made up its mind.

 

“I don’t think many people have to watch Fox to understand the—the political slant that they have,” Gibbs said. “They’re feeding an audience that they know want to see and hear a certain side of that argument.”

 

He cited the president’s sit-down with Fox News’s Bret Baier just before the health care vote as an example of the conservative-leaning outlet attempting to push an agenda.

 

“I think the uniqueness of having an interview with the president is getting a chance to sit as close as we are and getting that insight,” Gibbs told Kurtz. “I don’t think historians will look back on that interview and think, ‘Boy, we really got a sense of what the president was thinking right before such a historic achievement.’”

 

Gibbs said the administration has also called out MSNBC hosts behind the scenes, and that the cable news format “where people yell at each other, I’m not entirely sure what that does for people that watch. Maybe that’s why quite frankly less people are watching.”

 

He dismissed the idea the administration was elevating conservative talkers Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity by calling them out by name, suggesting that those hits were aimed at a broader American audience, not the listeners of those host’s programs, who, he said, had already made up their minds about the administration, and most everything else.

 

The adminsitration’s relationship with the press has been getting more strained lately and this statement by Gibbs on the press corps will certainly not do anything to bring the two sides closer together.

This doesn’t mean that the press isn’t willing to carry the adminsitrations water and for the most part they still are but little by little they are deciding to to their job rather than do the White House’s bidding and that will be a major problem for Obama and the Democrats going forward.

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