After   years of attack dog politics, the American people may not be able to let go of constant   invectives and dueling gotchas.  The latest example is the case   of Illinois’s corrupt Governor Rod R. Blagojevich.  His crimes   seem real enough and – should he be convicted of the alleged wrongdoings   – he deserves punishment for his malfeasance.  Prosecutor Patrick   Fitzgerald has laid out the charges in clear terms, and has also been   unambiguous about the president-elect’s lack of involvement.

Yet   in news cycle after news cycle, the drumbeat continues about a “shadow”   over the Obama presidency and about “distractions” that are frustrating   the incoming president’s preparations to govern the nation on January   20.  The political opposition takes it from there, attacking the   incoming president for not saying enough, for a lack of transparency,   or simply for shady behavior indistinct from the shady behavior that   started the process.

Who   casts these shadows?  Who has witnessed a “distracted” President-elect   Obama unable to fill his cabinet posts?  It feels trite to say.

I am a strict defender   of the media’s place in the overall checks and balances of a democratic   society, but
 the media are responsible.  The 24-hour news cycle has had a definitively corrosive effect, in which even the most innocuous of events can rise to the   level of Breaking News and every public scandal, however meaningless,   is treated as the second coming of Watergate.

Reporters   on cable news channels often replace interviewing with a series of leading   questions that bully the respondents into the answers they were seeking   in the first place.  Actually, many reporters taking positions are not   reporters at all, but op-ed columnists or commentators, and should be   labeled as such.  There is nothing wrong with having opinions and   sharing them with whoever will listen, but dressing them up as fair,   balanced or even smart journalism is ridiculous and a disservice to   the profession.

One   of the major problems plaguing straightforward journalism is that it   tends to be boring in light of our action-packed, video-game-fueled   world, whereas controversy and reports of high-level wrongdoings are   exciting.  Alternatively, much straightforward reporting on television   is so weightless that it almost becomes elevator music.  When there’s   nothing better to say, the networks tout their news teams as “the   best team in … (name the area that’s being covered).”  Do these   journalists understand the difference between marketing and journalism?    I don’t remember a single course in journalism school on how to position   your media outlet for greater credibility and the resultant higher ratings   and increased advertising.

Newspapers,   the bastion of solid, in-depth reporting, are no longer read by the   majority of the population, and the Web emphasizes the new and brief   over depth and accuracy.  So the news most of us see is little   different from “Access Hollywood” or “Entertainment Tonight,”   and reporters are becoming little different from paparazzi.

This   modern reality encourages news outlets to focus on the spectacular rather   than the important, and to cover political marketing as if it were the   Gettysburg Address.  It’s no wonder the politicians unabashedly   fabricate their “gotcha” moments when the media invariably leads   with them and further energizes them with insistent questioning on the   issue.

In   the final analysis, it is up to citizens to separate reality from political   posturing, but it doesn’t help that the media in its current form   seek anything “new” versus anything “news,” and highlights   any hint of controversy over the intellectually honest reporting of   what truly drives America and the world.