A Person Carrying A Bucket Of Dung Wonders Aloud What That Smell Is
Minnesota Public Radio's midmorning chat program, titled, with the full force of MPR originality, Midmorning, focused this morning on President Obama's speech to school children, or rather, the "controversy" that this speech has engendered among the outraged usual suspects. Host Kerri Miller, who does a brisk trade in earnest intellectual pretense regardless of topic, stated at the top of the hour that she and her guests would be discussing, among other things, if this controversy indicated a changing perception of the Presidency in the post-Obama era.
One doesn't have to be Werner Heisenberg to answer firmly in the "duh." By posing the question to a mass audience, Ms. Miller as a member of the media is herself a part of the cause of that perception change-- no media attention, no controversy, no controversy, no perception change. To the extent Ms. Miller acknowledged this causal relationship at all, however, she, like most people who have access to cameras and/or microphones jacked into a system of mass dissemination, nattered blithely on about "the media" as if it were an abstract concept that had nothing whatsoever to do with her.
And, like most people trying to take an "in depth" look at one of our myriad current "controversies," Ms. Miller and her guests-- one vaguely on the left, one quite definitely on the right, as per media standards, plus one journo each from radio and print-- spent much of their time splashing around in the shallow end. With this particular story, that's entirely understandable-- apart from the sort of media criticism Ms. Miller implicitly separates herself from, it isn't that deep a story. This "controversy" began with yahoo "infotainers" like Malkin and Limbaugh declaring that Obama's speech to schoolchildren constituted "socialist indoctrination," and continued because folks like Ms. Miller continued to devote air time to it. It isn't a serious issue, never was, and never will be, no matter how much air and ink is thrown at it.
Perhaps the best possible comment on this sort of "controversy" derives from an old bit of schoolyard wisdom-- generally, those as smelt it, dealt it, and are probably continuing to fill the air with S.B.D.s the whole time they're telling you about it.
