Jay Rosen to Barack Obama: Be yourself!

Some interesting speculations by Jay Rosen on his PressThink site about the future shape of government/media realtions under the Obama administration in the U.S.

The thing he is pretty sure of is that they will have to be less opaque and dismissive than those of the Bush/Cheney years:

What is over? The idea of one interlocutor, the White House press corps, acting as our quasi-official watchdog, and an oligopoly of firms—Big Media—through whom news of the presidency flows. That’s over. The big firms are not done; they still have serious pipe going out to homes and bars. But their world is shifted. The White House can go direct—that’s what whitehouse.gov is—and people can go direct (in certain limited ways) to the White House. Control over the sphere of legitimate debate is more widely distributed. The presidency has never had a participation wing, but this seems to be under discussion. Who knows where that goes. Today, however, the White House started blogging.

Behold the communications operation at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. It is a broadcaster and media company in itself, with global reach and an unstoppable brand. The White House briefing room, where the press is informed and asks questions, is sacred space for projecting American power and explaining the president’s positions around the world. Making a farce of that space, as Bush did, is not in American interests. Recovering civil and truthful uses for it is.

For more read here.