(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

Every sportswriter learns one simple rule in a very quick hurry — namely, that nobody out in your readership cares how hard you think your job is. People, to paraphrase Michael J. Fox's channelling of the Stephanoplouli in The American President, don't give a damn about your problems, they give a damn about their own. Therefore, columns about media shuttles being late, or cold food in the press room, or the quality of the bath towels in the headquarters hotels become the object of swift and righteous ridicule on the part of the people who read them. This is a lesson apparently lost on the elite political press, and especially on the presiding geniusesbehind Tiger Beat On The Potomac. But, first, here's Mike McCurry being completely silly.

"The balance of power used to be much more in favor of the mainstream press," said Mike McCurry, who was press secretary to President Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Nowadays, he said, "The White House gets away with stuff I would never have dreamed of doing. When I talk to White House reporters now, they say it's really tough to do business with people who don't see the need to be cooperative."

Imagine a former Clinton press secretary pining for the days when the mainstream press chased every fantasy promoted by every two-bit hustler in every fish camp in Arkansas. Is this man trying to kill Gene Lyons?

Anyway, back to the two presiding geniuses, who go on for some time explaining how the Obama people are better at their jobs than the PG's are at theirs and, therefore, are a rapidly growing threat to the Republic.

The results are transformational. With more technology, and fewer resources at many media companies, the balance of power between the White House and press has tipped unmistakably toward the government. This is an arguably dangerous development, and one that the Obama White House - fluent in digital media and no fan of the mainstream press - has exploited cleverly and ruthlessly. And future presidents from both parties will undoubtedly copy and expand on this approach.

The grammar in that second sentence went briefly to the zoo, but I think they're saying that the White House has more technology and that the media companies have fewer resources. (Something with which TBOTP has had some recent experience, and one might also mention that "media companies" often are struck stupid by cowardicewhen confronted by candidates who don't even win. This also contributes to the aforementioned imbalance of power. We continue.) And this is a surprise to approximately nobody who's watched as the clowns who run America's newspapers cratered the industry over the past 20 years. If these guys are really making the case that "do more with less" doesn't work, let them start with overseas bureaus, and not the various loungers in the White House press corps.

But Obama and his aides have raised it to an art form: The president has shut down interviews with many of the White House reporters who know the most and ask the toughest questions. Instead, he spends way more time talking directly to voters via friendly shows and media personalities. Why bother with The New York Times beat reporter when Obama can go on "The View"?

Yeah, that worked out well when Judy Miller was covering the WMD beat.

The frustrated Obama press corps neared rebellion this past holiday weekend when reporters and photographers were not even allowed onto the Floridian National GolfClub, where Obama was golfing. That breached the tradition of the pool "holding" in the clubhouse and often covering - and even questioning - the president on the first and last holes.

Oh, get a grip, Mary. Or at least read the hilarious chapter in Tim Crouse's The Boys On The Bus about covering the Nixon White House. And, against all odds, it gets worse.

The way the president's availability to the press has shrunk in the last two years is a disgrace," said ABC News White House reporter Ann Compton, who has covered every president back to Gerald R. Ford. "The president's day-to-day policy development - on immigration, on guns - is almost totally opaque to the reporters trying to do a responsible job of covering it. There are no readouts from big meetings he has with people from the outside, and many of them aren't even on his schedule. This is different from every president I covered. This White House goes to extreme lengths to keep the press away."

So don't cover the White House from the White House. The Executive Branch is a big operation with many offices in many places. Perhaps there might be a hint of what the White House is doing Out There Somewhere.

One authentically new technique pioneered by the Obama White House is extensive government creation of content (photos of the president, videos of White House officials, blog posts written by Obama aides), which can then be instantly released to the masses through social media. They often include footage unavailable to the press. Brooks Kraft, a contributing photographer to Time, said White House officials "have a willing and able and hungry press that eats this stuff up, partly because the news organizations are cash-strapped."

It is not — repeat, not — the president's fault that major media corporations are run by bean-counting morons. (It is his fault that he hasn't done more on the issue of media consolidation, but that's not what the PG's are going on about here.) Of course the White House will exploit this fact to its own advantage. The White House is a political operation. That's what those things do.

By no means does Obama escape tough scrutiny or altogether avoid improvisational moments. And by no means is Obama unique in wanting to control his public image and message - every president pushes this to the outer limits. His 2012 opponent, Mitt Romney, was equally adept at substance-free encounters with reporters. But something is different with this White House. Obama's aides are better at using technology and exploiting the president's "brand." They are more disciplined about cracking down on staff that leak, or reporters who write things they don't like. And they are obsessed with taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every other social media forums, not just for campaigns, but governing.

Ah, the ol' balancing paragraph. And right on schedule, too. After which we learn that, yes, even in the field of social media, the Romney campaign was an exercise in distilled suckitude. I am shocked — SHOCKED! — to learn this.

"They use every technique anyone has ever thought of, and some no one ever had," New York Times White House reporter Peter Baker told us. "They can be very responsive and very helpful at pulling back the curtain at times while keeping you at bay at others. And they're not at all shy about making clear when they don't like your stories, which is quite often."

A similar complaint was raised by scribes covering the court of Hammurabi, I believe. Ask Bob Schieffer. He was there.

Conservatives assume a cozy relationship between this White House and the reporters who cover it. Wrong. Many reporters find Obama himself strangely fearful of talking with them and often aloof and cocky when he does. They find his staff needlessly stingy with information and thin-skinned about any tough coverage. He gets more-favorable-than-not coverage because many staffers are fearful of talking to reporters, even anonymously, and some reporters inevitably worry access or the chance of a presidential interview will decrease if they get in the face of this White House.

Translation From The Original Weaselspeak (First Half Of Paragraph): Uppity president fellow thinks he's sooooooo smart. We'll get him at recess. Translation From The Original Weaselspeak (Second Half Of Paragraph): Uppity president fellow has audacity to act like every other president in history, except he has Facebook. See list that follows, culminating in:

They are also masters of scrutiny avoidance. The president has not granted an interview to print reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, POLITICO and others in years. These are the reporters who are often most likely to ask tough, unpredictable questions.

Everybody sing! "One of these things is not like the others, one of these things is not the same." No, stop, seriously, you're killing me, fellas. Yeah, the president is hiding under the bed because he's afraid one of your tyros is going to get all up in his grill with a stone-killer "Some people say you're an uppity schmuck" kind of question. A lecture about how the White House catapults propaganda from the home office of the "Some Republican strategists say..." school of anonymous political slander? A seminar in the propagation of bullshit from the the country's largest gossip silo? How in the hell do the people at the Times, the Post, and the WSJ feel about your lumping yourself in there with them? Who the fck are you when you're at home?

While White House officials deny it is intentional, this administration -like its predecessors - does some good old-fashioned bullying of reporters: making clear there will be no interviews, or even questions at press conferences, if aides are displeased with their coverage.

And, from spring training camps in Florida and Arizona, every major-league beat writer in America says in one voice — "And your point is?"

For their big finish, and as a demonstration of the looming threat to democracy posed by this president's acting like every other president in history, except with Twitter, and as a demonstration of how the People's Right To Know about serious public policy issues is being curtailed, the PG's return to that offense against self-government known as ... Skeetgate.

Obama and his team, especially newly promoted senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer, often bemoan the media's endless chase of superficial and distracting storylines. So how did the president's inner circle handle the silly dust-up about whether the president really did shoot skeet? Pfeiffer and White House press secretary Jay Carney tweeted a link to the photo, with Pfeiffer writing that it was "[f]or all the skeeters" (doubters, or "skeet birthers"). Longtime adviser David Plouffe then taunted critics on Twitter: "Attn skeet birthers. Make our day - let the photoshop conspiracies begin!" Plouffe soon followed up with: "Day made. The skeet birthers are out in full force in response to POTUS pic. Makes for most excellent, delusional reading." The controversy started with an interview co-conducted by Chris Hughes, a former Obama supporter and now publisher of The New Republic. The government created the content (the photo), released it on its terms (Twitter) and then used Twitter again to stoke stories about conservatives who didn't believe Obama ever shot a gun in the first place.

Administration dares monkeys to fling poo. Monkeys fling poo. The American experiment comes to a sad end.

Seriously, these guys get paid for this. I'm not kidding.

UPDATE — Greg Mitchell drives in the final nail.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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