(Via @jeffemanuel) It really has been a while since the last press conference, hasn’t it?

Will Barack Obama go an entire year without holding a formal news conference? He’s getting close: The president’s last full-scale session with the press was on July 22, 2009, which was 307 days ago.

[snip]

In its defense, the White House says Obama answers a lot of questions from reporters, just not in the traditional news-conference setting. In fact, the president does a lot of one-on-one interviews, frequently with sympathetic reporters. But even in terms of brief question-and-answer sessions with the White House press corps, he has still done fewer than Bush or Clinton.

Byron York goes on to document all the ways that the President strives to match the Right’s public disdain for the mainstream media; rather than rehash that, I’d like to make what may be a rather startling prediction. I predict that, some time shortly after the end of this fiscal quarter, a frustrated reporter still smarting from the totally unfair chewing-out by his or her editor is going to do the journalistic (and metaphorical) equivalent of rushing the podium and smacking Robert Gibbs right in the chops.  And when that happens, the White House press room is going to then rapidly look like the time I was trapped in a crowd of twelve year olds at the Great Adventure theme park, right after New Kids on the Block canceled their concert there*.

Yes.  That ugly.

Moe Lane*I (and one of my older sisters) was escorting my younger sister to said concert, of course.  I’ve never seen a crowd get ugly so fast, although admittedly we were experiencing it at high speed, away from the incipient riot (in classic ‘Sis, you grab one arm: I’ll grab the other; and let’s get the tween out of here’ fashion).  The worst bit was when they started teaming up to get the garbage cans airborne…

Crossposted to Moe Lane.