The networks are feeling pressured by the White House to televise presidential press conferences live, reports media writer Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post. Maybe that’s because they are being pressured, Kurtz suggests in a column titled “The Prez, The Press, The Pressure. Networks Grouse About Obama in Prime Time.”

Kurtz writes:

In the days before President Obama’s last news conference, as the networks weighed whether to give up a chunk of their precious prime time, Rahm Emanuel went straight to the top.

Rather than calling ABC, the White House chief of staff phoned Bob Iger, chief executive of parent company Disney. Instead of contacting NBC, Emanuel went to Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric. He also spoke with Les Moonves, the chief executive of CBS, the company spun off from Viacom.

Whether this amounted to undue pressure or plain old Chicago arm-twisting, Emanuel got results: the fourth hour of lucrative network time for his boss in six months. But network executives have been privately complaining to White House officials that they cannot afford to keep airing these sessions in the current economic downturn.

The networks “absolutely” feel pressured, says Paul Friedman, CBS’s senior vice president: “It’s an enormous financial cost when the president replaces one of those prime-time hours. The news divisions also have mixed feelings about whether they are being used.”

While it is interesting to see how a president handles questions, Friedman says, “there was nothing” at the July 22 session, which was dominated by health-care questions. “There hardly ever is these days, because there’s so much coverage all the time.”

Had Obama not answered the last question that evening — declaring that the Cambridge police had acted “stupidly” in arresting Henry Louis Gates at his home — the news conference would have been almost totally devoid of news. And that raises questions about whether the sessions have become mainly a vehicle for Obama to repeat familiar messages.

Kurtz notes that previous presidents haven’t enjoyed Obama’s success at getting TV coverage:

Since the Reagan era, when cable news was in its infancy, prime-time presidential pressers have been a relative rarity. George H.W. Bush held one in 1992, but the broadcast networks dismissed it as an election-year event and refused to carry it. The following year, when Bill Clinton held his first C, CBS and ABC stiffed him; NBC carried the first half-hour; only CNN and PBS aired the whole thing. George W. Bush held four such events in eight years.

But the networks have deemed Obama a box-office draw, featuring him on everything from “60 Minutes” to “The Tonight Show” to a 90-minute ABC town meeting on health care.