Network rounds mean no rest on Sunday for Obama

— -- President Obama will appear on a record five TV networks on Sunday plus sit down with late-night host David Letterman on Monday. It's the latest broadcast blitz for Obama, who has made himself accessible to news and entertainment outlets. USA TODAY's Catalina Camia and David Jackson take a look at Obama on television.

Obama plans to appear on the Sunday morning talk shows of ABC, NBC, CBS and sit for interviews with CNN and Spanish-language network Univision. He's skipping Fox, whose news channel he has said is "entirely devoted to attacking my administration." White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says the interviews are "an attempt by the president to speak to as many different people as he can on an issue that's as important as something like health care reform or on Afghanistan." Previous presidents have been grilled on the Sunday shows, but not all in one day. Obama drew 3.7 million viewers to CBS' Face the Nation in March, according to the Nielsen ratings company.

The Late Show with David Letterman stint will be the first by a sitting president on that CBS show, the network says. Obama last chatted with Letterman during the campaign. He'll tape the show in New York City on Monday afternoon, at the start of a busy week of diplomacy. He also addresses the United Nations and the global foundation run by Bill Clinton and hosts world leaders in Pittsburgh for the Group of 20 economic summit.

Obama will have done 124 print, broadcast and radio interviews by day's end on Sunday, according to a tally by Martha Joynt Kumar, a political scientist at Towson University in Maryland. George W. Bush did 40 and Bill Clinton did 46 by the same point in their presidencies. She says Obama, as a former lawyer and law professor, "likes to talk about things in depth."

Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University, says the president risks overexposure but has little choice if he wants to get out his message. "The idea that familiarity breeds contempt may be a cliché because there's some truth to it," he says. Still, Thompson says most Americans won't be watching Obama on Sunday or Monday: "The reason he's doing these shows is because the audience is fragmented."