The President and the Press

The press conference with President Barack Obama following the 2014 midterm elections just the fourth formal, solo question-and-answer exchange Obama had held in the White House in 2014, has come to define the current state of White House reporting, one in which there is a gulf between the press and the head of state it’s charged with covering.

The answers are long, leaving time for just a few questions from a press corps with already-limited access to the president. Actual news is almost never made, since the White House has new tools allowing it to release and manage news on its own schedule and terms -- its online news report is but one of these. The relationship between the president and the press is more distant than it has been in a half century.

[Susan Milligan is a Washington, DC-based freelance writer]