Eric Boehlert: 100 days of the media's trivial pursuit

[babylonsister]

100 days of the media's trivial pursuit
by Eric Boehlert | April 29, 2009


It's fitting that the foolery started right in time for Barack Obama's inauguration.

As January 20 approached, the Beltway press corps announced the new tone and tenor it had adopted for covering the incoming Democratic administration. Suddenly obsessed with trivia, while glomming onto nitpicking, gotcha-style critiques, the press corps transformed itself from its Bush-era persona in preparation for the new administration's traditional 100-day White House sprint.

Unfortunately, the Obama coverage has often featured a toxic combination of trivial pursuit with a passion for process. The results have, at times, been gruesome, with the news media obsessing over White House iPods, and fashion "showdowns," and puppies, and soft drinks, and parking lots, and condoms, and hand gestures, and gaffes, and laughs, and celebrity magazines, and teleprompters, and rounds of golf, and sleeveless dresses, on and on. The list of press inanities has grown quite long in just 100 days.

It's been distressing to watch the emergence of the media's permanent -- preferred -- state of trivial pursuit and the suddenly open assumption that trivia, often in the name of process, is just as important and noteworthy as actual news.

The trend has been impossible to escape, and even some journalists have acknowledged it. But they've suggested that it simply reflects our sped-up, lightning-fast media landscape and that new technology is forcing reporters and pundits to make instant calculations and premature political pronouncements.

Baloney. There hasn't been some sort of technological media revolution since President Bush left office in January, a revolution that's forced the Beltway press corps to act in a dramatically different, and in some cases almost unrecognizable, fashion. (Twitter existed while Bush was in office, correct?) It's just that the Beltway press corps has chosen to act in a dramatically different, and hyper-caffeinated, fashion in order to cover the new Democratic White House.

Others in the press have blamed the paucity of hard news coming from the White House, claiming that's what has forced reporters to dwell on trifling events. But that cop-out doesn't fly either, because the Obama White House is no more tight-lipped than the previous one. Yet faced with an uncooperative (Republican) White House for most of this decade, journalists didn't resort to trolling for trivia the way they do today. Indeed, the current brand of never-ending trivial pursuit represents an entirely new, and completely voluntary, media phenomenon.

The sad truth is, news pros have actually been blessed with a cacophony of larger-than-life news events and crisis moments packed into the very short time span of Obama's first 100 days, a window filled with natural drama and breaking news as the new president has scrambled to make sense of the country's economic troubles and passed monumental legislation in a historically quick manner.

more...

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/21536