Barack Obama destroyer of Mass Media

The coolest hippest most tech-savvy president in the history of our great nation is trying to undermine the free press, and hasten it's demise. Now I'm not talking about what happened during his first press conference when he took questions from Huffington post, and snubbed the New York Times and the Washington Post.

No, what the president has done now is much more subtle and much more dangerous, and what's worse it's masquerading as good government.

You can go to a website, www.recovery.gov, and find detailed and relatively objective information about how stimulus dollars are being spent. The problem is this website wasn't put together by a group of investigative reporters or even some government watchdog group. It was launched by the Obama administration in the name of open government.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm glad this administration (at least in its infancy) is more open than the previous one. But I worry that the youth movement that propelled Obama to the White House and continues to adore him, will start to believe that the job of unveiling government information belongs to the government and not to journalists and the media.

And this is very dangerous for the sake of our democracy.

We function because we have a free press that monitors what government is doing. But I'm worried that Ipod generation, of which I am now a member, might start thinking that protecting newspapers and the good journalism they produce is no longer important because 1) everything you need to know is on Twitter and 2) our savior Obama is completely open and honest.

It's one thing to have faith in your government. It's another to actually believe what they are telling you.

Maybe Obama really is the greatest president this side of Abe Lincoln and will continue to run his administration in an open manner, launching new websites airing his own dirty laundry at every opportunity.

But even if he does, there no reason to think the next guy at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. will do the same, and then, I know I'll miss a good newspaper.