Tiger (Woods) By The Tail

Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, the editors take a look at how the media is covering the Tiger Woods incident.

Not surprisingly, CJR notes that some media outlets are covering the actual story, while others are covering the coverage of the story. And that's where they point to a recurring problem with media today, noting the following passage from James Poniewozik's blog at Time magazine:

one of the most entertaining aspects is watching the contortions the respectable media go through to put a sufficiently meta spin on it, to justify covering the hot topic (and not passing up all those free eyeballs), while appearing to be serious-minded, and not like all those other outlets just trying to pry into Tiger Woods’ personal life.

Like so many things that the trapped-in-between mainstream media does nowadays, though, this probably does it little good in the long run…. What these half-measures do, more than anything, is convey the sense that the mainstream media is phony, inauthentic, that it lacks the courage of its convictions either to go all in and give the public what it wants, or take a bullet and stick to its principles. Trying to please everyone, it pleases no one.

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