The problem with press conferences

I don't attend many press conferences. I try to stay away from background briefings. I don't go to many small question-and-answer sessions. And I hate and loathe conference calls. Yves Smith, who just participated in a small briefing at the Treasury Department, captures my feelings perfectly:

[W]e bloggers and the government officials kept talking past each other, in that one of us would ask a question, the reply would leave the questioner or someone in the audience unsatisfied, there might be a follow up question (either same person or someone interested), get another responsive-sounding but not really answer, and then another person would get the floor. The fact that the social convention of no individual hogging air time meant that no one could follow a particular line of inquiry very far.

These just aren't good venues for finding out what people think about things. It's not that you never learn anything, but you waste a lot of time not learning very much. They are, however, good for getting the e-mail addresses of people who might be able to answer your questions at a more leisurely pace sometime down the road.