Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Media and Republicans on Obama's Seventeen Minute Answer - "We're Having a Cow, Man!"

Have we become such an attention-deficit culture that we can't go more then ten minutes on a single topic? Even if that topic is one of the more important issues in generations?

Everyone has counted the time President Obama spent answering a woman who complained about being over-taxed - 17 minutes, 12 seconds. They've counted the words - more than 2,500.

Does anyone remember the question, or President Obama's answer?

The Washington Post used nearly 600 words to detail Obama's 2,500, including "loquacious" and "discursive", in their quest to paint Obama as a meandering, professorial windbag, when they could have, let's say, noted that the reason Obama still needs to explain this stuff in excruciating detail is because of the lies and misinformation continually foisted on the public by Republicans and regurgitated by media outlets as if it was factual. Or something.

After eight years of the Bush administration, it's refreshing to have a chief executive who so intimately knows the details and intricacies of policy that he can be "loquacious" in the first place.

These details matter, or at least they should. But a certain segment of our population - and sadly, the news media - is more interested in sound bites and divisive narrative than they are facts and figures, because that's not what sells papers or network news ad time.

Wait a minute...isn't newspaper circulation plummeting, and hasn't network news lost just about every demographic except the target audience for all the pharmaceutical ads that run for roughly a third of the half-hour program?

That's what I thought.

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