Obama keeps newspaper reporters at arm’s length

But most of the nation’s biggest papers, whose reporters cover the White House every day, have remained on the outside looking in. The Washington Post landed its last on-the-record meeting with the president nearly four years ago, as did the Wall Street Journal; the New York Times last got to him in the fall of 2010. The Boston Globe has never had an interview while Obama was in office, nor has the Los Angeles Times, according to the Nexis database and the newspapers. Even Obama’s hometown papers, the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times, have been stiffed.

What’s more, despite a string of interviews with ethnic broadcasters, including Telemundo and Univision recently, Obama has never consented to an interview with any member of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, an organization consisting of 210 African-American-owned newspapers, said Robert W. Bogle, the organization’s former president. Obama and George W. Bush were the first presidents who haven’t done so since Franklin Roosevelt, notes Bogle, the chief executive of the Philadelphia Tribune.

(The New Republic) - The frequency of Obama’s interviews with magazines — including the New Republic, which recently landed an interview conducted by its owner — are a distant second to television, followed by radio.

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The cold shoulder from the White House has led, predictably, to expressions of disappointment among newspaper journalists.

“It used to be taken as a matter of course that the major newspapers would get an annual interview,” said Jackie Calmes, a White House reporter for the New York Times. “Now I take it for granted that it’s not going to happen.”

Anders Gyllenhaal, Washington bureau chief for the McClatchy newspaper chain, laments that the White House “is missing an opportunity” to address millions of newspaper readers. Before the Democratic Convention in Charlotte last summer, Gyllenhaal said, McClatchy put in a request to interview the president on behalf of its 30 daily newspapers, which include the Miami Herald and the hometown Charlotte Observer. The request was “laughed off” by the White House communications staff, he said.

The irony, says David Leonhardt, the New York Times’ Washington bureau chief, is that “we know that the president is an avid reader of newspapers. Reporters often hear from people in the White House that he had thoughts or objections or praise for something [the reporters] wrote.”

Overall, Obama gave more than twice as many interviews to media outlets during his first term as Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton and the younger Bush did, said Martha Joynt Kumar, a political science professor at Towson University who studies the presidency and the news media. But Obama’s share of print interviews is lower than his immediate predecessors’, she said.

Another key advantage of television is that it enables the president to target his message to specific audiences. In his interviews with Univision and Telemundo, for example, he talked about immigration reform, presumably an issue of intense interest to the networks’ Spanish-speaking viewers. He pitched ideas to address climate change in an interview with MTV in October, presumably in a bid to win over younger voters. On “The View,” he has appealed to the program’s large female audience.