The New York Times has to be joking printing an article like this:
Are any of these items newsworthy? (It's not as if the country is facing two wars and an economic crisis or anything.). Well, yes, they are — a lot of Web sites, bloggers and Twitterers have deemed these developments so. While there has always been a hearty appetite for stories — and trivia — about the people in a new administration, today's White House press corps (competing for up-to-the-second news) has elevated the most banal doings to a coveted “get.”
BarbinMD points out that the Times hardly has a leg to stand on, having obsessed over Michelle Obama's arms, the president's graying hair, and what time their daughters go to bed. But what I find absolutely staggering is that the newspaper that prints Maureen Dowd's column twice a week is complaining about blogs focusing on "trivia" and issues that aren't "newsworthy." Dowd doesn't just make the most "banal doings" a "coveted get," she elevates utter trivialities into a grand unified theory of everything that comes down to one of three conclusions:
Liberal man X is actually a woman
Liberal woman X is actually a man
Conservative man X is big and tough, like the daddy you always wanted/wanted to be/never had
Meanwhile, I recall a telling scene at Obama's first press conference, during which the Huffington Post's Sam Stein asked the president whether he would support a truth commission for investigating Bush administration abuses. Just prior to Stein's question, reporter Michael Fletcher from the Washington Post asked a burning, important question that was on all of our minds as the nation is fighting two wars and dealing with an economic crisis:
Yeah, thank you, sir. What's you're reaction to Alex Rodriguez's admission that he used steroids as a member of the Texas Rangers?
Indeed. The country is going to hell, and it's because bloggers won't act like real journalists, relinquishing their obsession with trivia and minutiae.
-- A. Serwer
