Media Matters

I’m predisposed to be skeptical of complaints – from either side of the aisle – about the “mainstream” (or “beltway” or “corporate” or “lamestream”) media, but this story has me scratching my head. Under the headline “Obama State of the Union lands with a thud in Congress” and beginning with the line, “That went nowhere fast,” NBC News’ First Read ostensibly reports on Congress’ reaction to President Obama’s Tuesday night address, but in fact reads more like a Mitch McConnell campaign mailer. Remind me again what McConnell’s position is within the Senate leadership? Oh, right: Minority Leader. The article is almost entirely devoted to McConnell’s (absolutely unsurprising) outright rejection of the proposals the president advanced in his speech, along with some backup singing from Speaker of the House John Boehner. Only one Democratic member of Congress – California’s Maxine Waters – is even mentioned, and she’s given a two-word quote presented so without context that it’s unclear whether she’s responding to Boehner or the president.

It’s perfectly legitimate to report on Republican leaders’ reactions to the speech; it is not legitimate to present their reactions as the reaction of Congress as a whole, silently writing off nearly half of the House and the majority of the Senate. It is also not legitimate to suggest that the speech – which was popular with the public, and with Democratic and liberal commentators and opinion leaders, and (most relevantly to this story) with Democratic members of Congress – was a failure merely because the president’s two most predictable (not to say kneejerk) critics didn’t like it.

It would also be perfectly legitimate to present some analysis of the president’s proposals chances of being enacted by this Congress, which are admittedly slim for many of the specific ideas… but the article doesn’t do that, either: All it really does is give two partisans a podium from which to attack the president. That may be something, but it’s not reporting the news.

Not To Sound Like a Broken Record, But...

…I’m getting really, really, really tired of the Huffington Post and its misleading, hype-drenched headlines.

By “headlines,” I mean the text of links that appear along with a thumbnail photo on HuffPo’s front page, or on one of its main topic pages, and point to the actual story. In many cases, the title that appears above the actual story text is fine, but the “headline” link text implies that the story is bigger, juicier, or more consequential — often much more so — than it really is. The president has even mentioned this tendency in passing in recent weeks.

And speaking of the president, the example that has me griping about this again, even after the Jennifer Carroll story I’ve written about yesterday and earlier today, is this headline on the HuffPost Politics front page: “Obama Booed for Big Fail.”

”Big fail”? What could that mean? A major political gaffe on the campaign trail? Some inadvertent insult to an audience (or perhaps an advertent one, like Mitt Romney’s apparently deliberate diss of the NAACP last week)? An international-incident-provoking diplomatic blunder?

Nope. The president’s “big fail” was failing to realize that the “Kiss Cam” was trained on him and the First Lady while they watched the USA Basketball men’s/women’s Olympic prep doubleheader against Brazil last night at the Verizon Center in Washington, DC. Not realizing the Kiss Cam was showing them (or perhaps not being familiar with the Kiss Cam concept, since I don’t imagine they have time to get to lots of games), the First Couple… didn’t kiss. And the crowd apparently booed… but given that the same crowd had given the president’s entourage (which included the vice president and the president’s personal aide Reggie Love, in addition to the First Lady) “loud cheers” when they first arrived, I’m guessing the boos were more along the lines of good-natured teasing than serious disapproval. After Sasha and Malia Obama clued their parents in at halftime, they got another shot at the public smooch, and this time they apparently stuck the dismount.

It’s a cute little human interest story about the president showing up to support our Olympic teams, but “big fail”? Eh, not so much.

My Mr. Coffee Moment

Reading this story today about the death of Mr. Coffee co-founder Samuel Glazer gave me a moment of pause: I was reminded yet again how many of the ubiquitous details of modern life are surprisingly recent innovations. Mr. Coffee first introduced automatic drip coffee machines — long a staple in commercial kitchens — to the home market in 1972, when I was just finishing up middle school¹ and getting ready to start high school. In short order, the big percolators that had been the sine qua non for parties and holiday meals at my house and the homes of my parents’ friends essentially disappeared, and the market position of instant coffee took a serious hit. By now, the drip coffee maker is such a universal in the home kitchen that walking into a kitchen that didn’t contain one would seem freakishly odd.

Technological change is constant and continuous, of course: I don’t mean to suggest that any one invention (and certainly not something as cosmically small as a new style of coffee maker) is a watershed. But, perhaps because change is constant, with epochal changes accumulating in tiny daily increments, it sometimes catches me by surprise when I’m reminded how terribly new so much of the world I live in really is. It’s not so much a matter of the “shock of the new” as it is the shocking newness of the commonplace.

Watch an old movie, and find yourself wondering why the imperiled protagonist doesn’t simply call for help using a cell phone or Google the answer to their problem… and then remember that most people didn’t have cell phones or Google back then… and then take in the realization that the “back then” represented in this “old” movie is no more than 10 or 12 years ago! The technologies behind cell phones, computers, digital television, etc., may have been invented decades ago, but the extent to which they define the fabric of daily life for ordinary people is, from any sort of an historical perspective, instantaneously new: It’s essentially all happened within my adult life, and much of it has happened during the lifetime of my daughter, who will graduate from college this year.

Back in the early 70s, when Samuel Glazer was helping revolutionize home coffee making, microwave ovens and electronic calculators were making their way into homes (I remember what a revelation the 4-function, single-memory desktop calculator my dad brought home was, compared to the neighbor’s electromechanical adding machine). My father brought home an Ericophone handset at a time when owning your own phone (as opposed to renting it from the phone company monopoly) was still an exotic, legally grey activity, and pushbutton phones and home cordless phones (complete with walkie-talkie style telescoping metal antennas) were on the bleeding edge. Widespread adoption of cable television (“pay for TV?!?!”) was still more than half a decade in the future, as was the advent of home videocassette recorders (now, of course, themselves made extinct by the DVR and streaming internet video). The Apple ][ computer wasn’t released until 1977 (I bought my first, a 48k RAM Apple ][+, in 1982), and the original IBM PC not until 1981, but the computer-as-we-know-it has even later roots: the Apple Macintosh in 1984 and the first truly useful versions of Microsoft Windows not until the early 90s. I saw my first cell phone — an expensive, large-ish box permanently installed in the car of a privileged student at the private high school I taught at — in 1984, but it wasn’t until well into the next decade before the phenomenon of mobile phones in the pockets of the middle class began to be widespread.

Commercialization of the internet and widespread private access to the World Wide Web began around 1995, before which most people’s online experience, if any, was limited to proprietary membership services such as CompuServe, Genie, Prodigy, and America Online (AOL), accessed through glacially slow dialup modems. Only after the turn of the millennium, with the build-out of digital cable, DSL, and direct-to-home satellite services, did high-bandwidth, always-on internet access become commonplace. And, of course, smartphones and tablet computers, in which the telecommunications and computing streams are finally fully integrated, are barely out of metaphorical diapers.

And there you have it: The world we² live in, constantly connected to a rich matrix of information, media, and communications (not to mention all the other technological and social innovations not directly related to the information technology revolution) is younger than this year’s college seniors. And yet… from moment to moment and day to day, it often seems as if it has always been this way.

Just like there has always been a Mr. Coffee machine in the kitchen.

¹ Junior high school, in my actual case, but that term seems to be disappearing, along with junior college.

² I’m admittedly using a fairly privileged version of we, here, but the world I describe is increasingly the cultural matrix for even the less privileged, at least throughout the so-called first world.

A Reason To Spend Thursday Evening Bowling

This is about as far as I can imagine from being Must See TV! I can only wonder whether the networks will give this lamest of lame ducks the time he requests. If this were The West Wing, probably not, but in the real world I suspect they'll acquiesce out of "respect for the office"... as if its current occupant had shown any!

Normally a president's farewell address is something I wouldn't miss, but in this case I hope someone will fill me in if he happens to say something interesting. Unless he's promising to fly directly to the Hague to turn himself in, I don't want to hear it.