This President is No Cable Guy

Excerpt:

Bill Clinton, whose operatic second term coincided with the creation of Fox News and the rise of stentorian TV talkers like Chris Matthews, was the nation's first true cable news president. George W. Bush was a uniter not a divider in one important way – his polarizing presidency united the conservatives in front of Fox while the beleaguered liberals clicked their way over to MSNBC.

Barack Obama, of course, is a TV natural who understands the first lesson of visual politics: If you want to make friends with Washington photographers, get a dog. But at the same time he is delivering a camera friendly White House, Obama is simultaneously positioning himself as the first anti-cable-news president. An under-appreciated theme of Obama's first 14 weeks on Pennsylvania Avenue is his obvious distaste for the bickering and snickering that characterizes cable news across the ideological spectrum.

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