Probably the biggest challenge we have with our inadequate media coverage is that they just do not address the entire issue from a policy perspective. They gloss over important information to focus on the public's perceived outrage or a politician's bombastic statements, and that's a disservice to us all. Media Matters describes a recent situation as an example.
CJR's Katia Bachko has an interesting look back on Obama's press conference this week and how the press covered the aftermath; how the press routinely referred to Obama as "professorial," which was meant to be an insult because he went on and on too long with facts and figures and philosophies.
Bachko laments how much time and attention the press spent on dissecting Obama's "tone" at the press conference, as if that were news. (We tagged the NYT for similar nonsense this week.) Bachko concludes:
In the end, the focus on tone demonstrates all over again how the press transforms politics into a blood sport with quantifiable winners and losers, which is disconnected from the significance of actual policy—roads built, hospitals staffed, schools renovated. The impulse to cover the horse race at the cost of the seriousness of governance persists. In this case, if Obama’s the professor, then the press is a bunch of unruly kids who won’t calm down after recess. The election is long behind us, get back to work.
Sadly though, I think that misses the larger truth about our Beltway press corps. What we're seeing now with the press obsession with style and "tone" and gotcha nonsense represents all that the Beltway media are capable of. There is no "back to work" option because the press doesn't do public policy. Period. That was made abundantly clear during the campaign season, especially the final three months, when process and polling pretty much edged out any attempt examine the candidates' agendas.
There are many, many other examples in the media's coverage of political and military issues that I could site, but I don't think it's really necessary to elaborate on this problem. It's sad, but that's all we get these days. As newspapers shrink and news shows battle for ratings, they make themselves increasingly irrelevant to the discussion of real issues.
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