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Thursday, July 23, 2009
Boomer with Attitude / News The press reports 'stupidly'
Posted By John Grooms on Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 11:24 AM
If you still need proof that the American press today is beyond lame, take a look at, or listen to, news coverage of last night’s press conference by Pres. Obama. Around 90-95 percent of the presser was devoted to detailed aspects of health care reform, so you’d think most news outlets would be dissecting the Prez’s statements this morning, right? Most newspapers, to their credit, seem to be doing that, but not without giving nearly equal weight to what TV news shows and Internet news sites are focusing on, namely, Obama’s answer to a question about the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates.
Oh, the TV and Internet news people are pretending to care about their journalistic responsibilities — in other words, they grit their teeth and talk a bit about health care, albeit in their usual superficial way. But their eyes really light up when they get to jabber away like so: “Should Obama have said the police acted ‘stupidly’?” “Did Obama go too far in criticizing the police?” “Is Obama playing the race card?” and on and on and so forth ad nauseam. It’s enough to make you cry; that is, if you’re someone who thinks that plans to reform health care — which would affect, well, pretty much everybody in the United States — just might be a teensy bit more important than a solitary question about a guy getting arrested.
I quoted my dear old dad yesterday, and I’ll do it again now: “Hasn’t anybody around here got any sense?” I would just add, “Do these people have any sense of perspective left? Or has the 24-hour jumble of filler and bullshit, celebri-news stories they peddle permanently wrecked the way they see journalism?” Unfortunately, I think my question has already been answered.
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