My favorite media trick pulled out during sessions spent blatantly covering a story in a way that a large portion of the population doesn’t like, is to cover it by covering the coverage, here is what I mean. If you’ve tuned into any of the news networks this week you’ve seen Senator Obama on his “groundbreaking” and “historic” trip. Despite little real news the media is going berserk in Obamamania. They decided weeks before the visit would be historic before anything happened, now with massive resources devoted to the event, they have to deliver and are getting endlessly attacked from the right for their coverage. The solution?
After the coverage they continue the focus on Obama by covering the coverage, asking the question “is there too much coverage? Are we biased?” The beauty of this is that they use these quick segments to justify the previous unnecessary coverage and to give the impression that they might not be overplaying their hand but are actually concerned about viewers.
Asking the question almost always leads nowhere. Most of these segments pit someone who says it is too much coverage against someone who says it isn’t. They fight for a minute or two, no one agrees on anything, the moderator or anchor asks a few questions, the segment ends and the coverage goes on.
It isn’t just about Obama either. The media often picks up on stories, beats them to death despite a lack of new information or the continuation of events, then looks dumb for clinging for too long before moving onto the next thing. They fills the space between or around these bouts with the aforementioned coverage of the coverage to get even more millage out of something that has no momentum. This election has been filled with these moments, Jeremiah Wright, Clinton crying in New Hampshire, Obama’s win in Iowa being seen as the end of the primary, the endorsement of Teddy Kennedy, Obama Girl and so on and so on.
All followed by endless coverage of the coverage asking “did we go too far, was there too much emphasis, will you still like us tomorrow?”
I can make it all easy, yes it is too much coverage and the coverage of the coverage is too much. If Obama brokers a Middle East peace deal while he is on the media tour, great that’s news, if he is just taking a bunch of photo ops and spitting out the same policies he had before the trip, it probably shouldn’t be your lead. History really hasn’t been made on this trip so far and it doesn’t look like it is going to be. Time to calm down!
I first began thinking about largely ignoring the Obama trip overseas when the Senator decided to announce his plan for Iraq and Afghanistan before leaving. Heading to the Middle East under the guise of a “fact finding mission” it was clear the Senator wasn’t really out to find anything in those nations other than anything to reinforce his world view. As I watched Obama state his objectives I wondered, “how can you announce your strategy JUST BEFORE you see the battleground? Without listening to the generals and the troops on the ground? Isn’t this the same charge given by Democrats against Bush for so many years?”
As Obama landed in Afghanistan only to announce, after his short stay, that the nation needed more troops, the media began its onslaught of hype and I began tuning out. With no clear reflection on how he would secure those NATO forces to maintain the operation in Afghanistan, he simply echoed statements made by Bush and McCain many moons before and gave little in the way of insight or innovation. Still the press swooned.
There is little that is actually newsworthy about Obama’s visit to the Middle East or Europe. All we have is a media moment, finely crafted by a campaign that holds the media so effortlessly in its tight grasp. So far there is little in the news of policy, little insight, little more than tightly controlled press events that are nice theater but have little substance. There is nothing that addresses the reality on the ground in either battlefield and nothing that addresses our problems here at home.
Instead we are treated to the media swooning over a candidate who has purposely done everything he can do to foster the images of Kennedy and Reagan, to tee up the imagery for the press so they can write hyperbole while filling in the miles of blanks that separate history from hype.
I don’t mean to disparage Obama personally. It is the job of a campaign to manipulate the press, to control the image and do everything it can to push its point of view. It is not, however, the job of the media to give in and simply sit back to broadcast the show. It is the job of the fourth estate to ask questions, to demand more of politicians than a few staged shows. It was clear weeks ago that wasn’t going to happen on this trip. Instead we would just get the pretty pictures, the cute stories and the campaign credo.
If and when news breaks on this trip, I will note it here. Increasingly though I have come to the conclusion that it is not the job of this site or any of the media to simply tow the line of either party or campaign or to just sit back and report on the bickering, the soundbytes and the fake outrage. It didn’t work for this nation in getting us into Iraq and it won’t work for us in winning the War. We need to do better, to think harder and to tear down the nice imagery in order to get to the gritty truth.
