The New York Times’ Peter Baker has a fascinating story today noting that despite Obama’s oft critiques of the modern news cycle, he’s as guilty as anybody for feeding it:

Yet after six months in office, perhaps no other president has been more attuned to, or done more to dominate, the news cycle he disparages. Mr. Obama has given roughly three times as many interviews as George W. Bush and held four times as many prime-time news conferences as Bill Clinton had by comparable points in their terms.

In the past four days, Mr. Obama gave “exclusive” interviews to Jim Lehrer of PBS, Katie Couric of CBS and Meredith Vieira of NBC. He gave two interviews to The Washington Post on one day, one to the editorial page editor and one to news reporters. He held a conference call with bloggers. His hourlong session in the East Room on Wednesday night was his second news conference of the day. And on Thursday, he invited Terry Moran of ABC to spend the day with him for a “Nightline” special.

I know the White House is doing what it can to capitalize on the President’s relatively high poll numbers, but the statistics in Baker’s piece are striking: In their first four months, Clinton gave 11 interviews and Bush gave 18, compared with 43 by Obama.

Robert Gibbs defends the number of interviews as reflective of the segmented nature of today’s news consumers (i.e., you can’t reach the entire country by giving an interview to any to or three reporters any longer). But offering multiple presidential interviews every week, on top of the four prime-time news conferences and daily message events seems more like being an inability to say “no” to media requests than an effective communications strategy. Rather, as I’ve written before, the Obama White House would be wise to do a better job of developing credible, high-level surrogates who can carry more of the water in the press.