This is on the media.

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

George W. Bush has barely sharpened the pencils in the Oval Office,

and already the press has turned into a blunt instrument.

The targets of media ire this week were not specifically the actions President Bush took,

for example, cutting aid to agencies that provide abortion services

overseas or proposing education vouchers, but the way he took them. Timothy Noah writes the chatterbox

column for slate.com. Welcome, Tim. Thank you. We've just completed week one of the Bush presidency.

What do you think of the coverage of the new

administration so far? Well, we are in the honeymoon phase, I guess, but one thing I was dismayed

to see was that even during the honeymoon phase, the reporters insist on constantly criticizing

the White House for not sticking to its script. It's constantly complaining that the presidency isn't sufficiently stage-matched.

We saw a bit of that, I thought, in the exchange between Ari Fleischer

and some of the reporters in the White House briefing room this week.

Do you not risk being distracted in your legislative agenda by doing this right out of the box?

I think it's something that everybody expected.

It is on top of the president's agenda.

He takes over a country, and this is the top.

And of all the...

I've issued a series of executive orders.

The Bush administration's surprise announcement of its policy stance on federal aid for

...