Perils of the Media Presidency

[Commentary] Some day an American president is going to have to figure out that modern electronic media is bigger than he is.

Partisans everywhere get upset that various nooks in the news media are too left or too right, for or against their president. That was media way back when, say four years ago. Now in addition to talk radio, talk television and newspapers, politicized media includes comedy, Twitter, newspaper websites that reboot the news every 60 seconds, vast email distribution lists among friends, smartphones and endless other streams of digitized input. What the media says matters. What's more important than what it says is that it simply is—everywhere and all the time. Like all the rest of us, the presidency is a cork on the information ocean. No president wants to admit he's a cork.

Only two presidents have held office in an always-on information milieu this vast—George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Both, in different ways, have not recognized the scale of the new reality and suffered for it.