Are TV reporters baiting the President?

Well, another testy press conference between the President and the press is winding down. At times, the President sounded like he was coming unglued. And yet, at other moments, he was lucid and even (egads) telegenic.

What's going on here?

I got the sense that NBC's David Gregory and others were plugging a quarter into the old jukebox and playing back the familiar favorites that TV viewers expect, whether they're viewers of "Nightly News," MSNBC, David Letterman or "The Daily Show."

And yet at other times, genuine Q-and-A emerged, with hard questions getting direct, non-rehearsed (sounding) answers. So I compared the President's exchange with Gregory to that with New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

The first exchange started with Gregory asking a "hypothetical." Actually, he asked what would happen if a CIA officer were captured in Iran or North Korea -- wouldn't he be "interrogated" the same way the President is proposing to interrogate detainees? It got a predictable response from Bush, who was flustered, and repeated himself (he gave about three variations on "you cannot ask a young professional to break the law"), and looked bad. After Gregory tried to get follow-ups, Bush lectured him -- "I know you think (this) is an important point" -- and then cut him off with, "You took too long asking your question."

No doubt Bush has been preparing for such encounters with reporters like Gregory. Perhaps his advisers tell him these things play well on cable TV and might, just might, drive up that approval rating.

Maybe so, but I never get more of a sense of the tragic, LBJ/Nixon quality to George W. Bush's presidency than these moments. Maybe some people would say that's a good thing. But if it's all being staged for the cameras -- if TV White House reporters are merely baiting the president -- than really, they're not advancing the story. In fact, all they're doing is supplying fodder for Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. I'm over that.  I don't take any pleasure in seeing Bush's worst lapses mocked on a comedy show.  There's too much blood being spilled in Iraq to play the same stupid video tricks over and over.

The situation in Iraq never feels more tragic or hopeless than when the leader of the free world is on live TV, acting like a wild critter who's been cornered.

And yet ... toward the end of the press conference, President Bush had an entirely different encounter with Stolberg. It began on a light note:

SHERYL: Hi, Mr. President.
POTUS: How you doing?
SHERYL: I'm well today, thank you. (Laughs nervously but kindly.)
POTUS: Did you start with, "Hi, Mr. President"?
SHERYL: Hello, Mr. President.
POTUS: That's fine, either way. I thought it was a friendly greeting.
SHERYL: Well, we are a friendly newspaper.
POTUS:  Yeah. (Comic reaction from POTUS. Widespread guffaws.) Let me just say, I'd hate to see un-friendly.

Was that a gender thing or just a common courtesy thing? Was it the fact that she's print and the others are TV?

At any rate, Stolberg asked just as hard a question as anyone at the press conference (you've had all summer, why didn't you work with the Congress on a detainee bill, and would you veto the current McCain measure), but she got a calm, reasoned, quotable response.

So is that what it takes? Would being nicer to the president get less hackneyed responses out of him? By all means, then, let's get Ed Bark a White House press card. He used to work the political beat. He  asks tough questions nicer than anyone I know in journalism. And he's available!