No one can argue that it's great having any leader willing to engage the media and find ways to openly communicate with those they are leading.

President Barack Obama is definitely doing everything he can to get his message out there, like any politician should do. But does he really have to keep asking for primetime blocks on the networks?

Seriously. The President says he wants to pull the county out of a recession, yet he is trying to take over the airwaves as often as Jay Leno will this fall. And while any network probably would kill to have a name like Leno or Obama, the difference between the two is that Leno's show will have ads, and Obama will cost networks advertising time and dollars.

Obama is set to address the nation Wednesday night to a joint session of Congress. This will be the seventh time in the nine months he took office that Obama has taken up primetime, and now he wants to do it just as the networks are gearing up for the fall season.

The country is in an economic crisis, no one is doubting that. But Obama isn't the first president to face it, and he won't be the last. When Ronald Reagan faced the 1980s economic downturn, you would see and hear him, but not typically in place of "Alf." George H.W. Bush spent most of his term dealing with recession and even a war in the Persian Gulf, but his primetime exposure was limited.

And Bill Clinton, who probably had the best connection with the mass audiences, might show up on MTV from time to time to play his saxophone, but rarely did he feel that his news conferences or speeches warranted a shutdown of the nation's broadcast entities.

It's just really unnecessary. And it really doesn't matter who the President is, what party they are from, or what it is they have to talk about. It's not like Obama doesn't have avenues to get his message out. His campaign was built on grassroots efforts through the Internet and other advancements in social networking.

It's great that the President wants to keep in touch with Congress and not have to wait for his State of the Union to address them jointly. But let's find a way that it can be the least impactful to the networks.

No one can blame Obama for wanting a primetime appearance here and there, but there are some presidents in the modern era who went two terms with just seven primetime addresses, and those were State of the Unions. Obama hasn't even done one of those yet, and he already is too far ahead in that statistical category.