Breaking News: Obama’s Third Grade Teacher Says Clinton ‘Sort of Frumpy’
I haven’t posted in a while, but I probably should, so here’s a CNN article on an Obama supporter refering to Bill Clinton and the infamous ‘blue dress.’ I want to address the newsworthiness and news values of this article, since it’s something that Obama has been dealing with for a few weeks.
First, by ‘Obama supporter,’ the story means someone who worked for Obama when he was running in the Iowa caucuses and has no connection to him now. This is basically the same thing that happened to Obama last week with Rev. Jeremiah Wright; he took heat because the news media (probably at the behest of the Clintons, for us paranoids in the audience) attributed something someone tangentially related to him to a ‘Obama supporter’ or Obama staffer. There also seems to be a double standard about this, since Geraldine Ferraro (who was actually working for Clinton’s campaign) practically called Obama a misogynst a few weeks ago and Clinton got significant less heat from the media.
This seems to be breaking one of the cardinal news values that we talked about in class: prominence. Is it really that important to know what that guy who cut Obama’s hair when he was in high school thinks about NAFTA? Do we really need to know what some guy who saw Obama speak once thinks about Iraq? Even if you want to argue that these people are in fact prominent, you can’t really argue that they’re VERY prominent, which makes this kind of stuff sensationalist at best.
Disregarding all that, this article doesn’t even seem to focus on the right sleaze. It ledes with Clinton’s blue dress, but the second sentence says the guy also compared Clinton to Joe McCarthy; likening your opponent to a witch-hunter is probably worse (and, I guess, more newsworthy) than making a reference to something that, you know, actually happened. If you’re going to be sensationalist, at least go with the right sensation.
EDIT: There’s a great column over at Rolling Stone about this issue by Matt Taibbi, probably the best gonzo journalist since Hunter Thompson blew his head off. Check it out for a more profane and probably more correct view of the media’s focus on unnewsworthy presidential “news.”
