Kevin Drum responds to my previous post with an interesting suggestion for President Obama:

So how does he work to change things? McQuaid warns that tightly controlling media access the way George Bush did isn’t the answer, and I agree. Instead, I’d say that he should send a consistent message about the value of serious journalism by providing the best access to the most serious journalists. Not the ones who are the most famous, or have the biggest audiences, or who agree with him the most often, but the ones who have written or aired the sharpest, liveliest, most substantive, most penetrating critiques of what he and his administration are doing. He should spar with them, he should engage with them, he should take their ideas seriously. Eventually, others will start to get the message: if you want to get presidential attention, you need to say something smart. It’s too late to for this to have any effect on media buffoons like Maureen Dowd or Chris Matthews, but you never know. It might encourage a few of the others to grow up. It’s worth a try, anyway.

I’d love to see Obama set up regular bull sessions with insightful journalists. It would offer a window on his thinking and also just be interesting and fun to watch. But since the problem exists in the broader media culture, not just Washington salons, this probably wouldn’t help all that much.

But two things offer hope on this front. First, the country faces grave crises, so serious news tends to crowd out trivial, character-driven stories. If Tim Geithner had been nominated during the Clinton administration, he likely would not have survived TurboTaxgate. (How many attorney general nominees did Clinton go through before settling on scandal-free Janet Reno?) But because we need competent, skilled leadership to forestall a second Great Depression, Geithner’s confirmation has never been in doubt. Of course, we have always needed competent, skilled leadership; too bad it takes terrible news to keep the psuedo-scandals at bay.

Second, Obama himself is good at breaking the rhythm of a feeding frenzy, either by starving it or by reframing the entire discussion. Last spring, for example, as damaging revelations about Rev. Jeremiah Wright poured forth, talking heads were urging Obama to publicly repudiate his former pastor — to take part in a crass, familiar ritual to appease and silence the media gods. He rejected that premise and instead gave his excellent speech on race, which both gobsmacked and impressed the establishment media.

The White House press corps is not going to stop asking gotcha questions. Talking heads are going to keep spouting speculative nonsense. But between the doom and gloom, major structural changes in government and a president who will occasionally talk substance, the media may be forced to set aside some of its trivial obsessions.

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