WASHINGTON, D.C. – “We even let him in,” quipped one White House communications aide.

She pointed at me, “How old are you, Alexander?”

“19,” I mumbled.

“He founded his own Website covering politics.”

There I sat slightly embarrassed, a roast beef sandwich and Mountain Dew on my lap, as an outfit of Virginia’s daughters, all undergraduate journalism majors, toured the White House press briefing room. I briskly escorted myself to the back of the press area, decompressing with assorted members of the camera crew.

This is the White House’s facade of “unprecedented transparency”: the notion that wider press membership must mean more real access, honesty, and everything else. Not exactly.

The truth is that the Obama Administration could be more open, starting with its top press commando.

No sooner than the arrival of Robert Gibbs to the press secretary’s podium did John Stewart take aim at Gibbs’s frequent refusal, like his recent predecessors, to answer questions directly, instead sticky glued to talking points and repeatedly pleading ignorance on basic questions related to the President’s positions. Stewart’s graphic showed Karl Rove and Scott McClellan’s heads morph into Gibbs’s own sunny disposition.

To members of the White House press corps, this “Daily Show” segment was more than an adolescent crack, it was a poignantly disconcerting, if eventually expected, reality of the new White House. Some habits are hard to break – under even a President who promised change.

Gibbs, like all press secretaries, has a symbiotic relationship with journalists. But sometimes that can all too quickly evolve into a parasitic one. With his charm and wit – and sometimes silly antics like confiscating cell phones ringing during briefings or sneaking up on a cable newser during a live shot – Gibbs understands how to play the game, a “news cycle” that centers increasingly on sensationalistic, opinion, and personality-driven coverage.

The decline of newspaper readership hasn’t helped upend this phenomenon. So it’s no surprise that journalists see a shortage of transparency when substantive and investigative reporting are not broadly undertaken.

If the Bo Obama sideshow weighed less prominently than stories of inner-city DC youth homelessness – despite consumer demand – maybe Gibbs and company would play a more serious game.

Michael Fletcher, the Washington Post reporter who asked about Alex Rodriguez’s steroid admission at the President’s inaugural news conference, explained to me the methodology behind framing that off-beat question. He laughed self-deprecatingly, “How exactly did that happen?”

But he added that such a spontaneous question is a necessity – not to catch a poised President Obama stumbling – but to clear the air and maybe get a straight answer.

“You throw whatever you can at them.”

It can work better than this.

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