"I think that often times in the press the attention in summits like this ends up focusing on where are the controversies," Obama said at one point this weekend. "Sometimes those controversies date back to before I was born."

The president said that in some ways the tone of the coverage harkens back "to the 1950s and gunboat diplomacy and Yanquis and the Cold War, and this and that and the other. That's not the world we live in today."

Indeed, there are disputes between the United States and Latin American nations over monetary policy, democracy promotion, how to battle drug trafficking, and other issues.

During this weekend's summit, Obama provided an example of conflicting media approaches, citing a pair of interviews on Spanish language television.