ABSTRACT
With all the new technologies available for instant communication, from the Internet to television, one might think that reading has become a lost art for presidents. It hasn’t, and it still enables the nation’s leaders to find a valuable link to the world of ideas and especially to history. They don’t read newspapers as much as presidents used to, for several reasons: they don’t learn much from the press, they feel that the print medium is in decline and they need to focus on other forms of communication such as the Internet and social media, and they don’t like to read negative stories about themselves (which tend to be what the newspapers provide).
