Crack media watchers NewsBusters are super pissy because the Chicago Tribune is covering Barack Obama a bunch.
To be clearer: the hometown newspaper of the President-Elect of the United States of America is spending a ton of time covering said President-Elect, particularly on days where he comes back to said hometown. And this is problematic. Mainly because Sarah Palin is amazing, partially because there are still unanswered questions about whether or not Tony Rezko bought Barack Obama’s first afro pick.
This is why Mark “Please Love Me, Hugh Hewitt” Halperin’s idiotic complaints about pro-Obama media bias not only don’t elicit sympathy, but truly make you wonder what this man has ever done to deserve a paycheck. Halperin’s complaint isn’t that the media was biased towards Obama; it’s that Obama refused to be a worse person and run a worse campaign than John McCain. To put it bluntly, Barack Obama fucked campaigning’s shit up for the better part of a year - he did virtually everything right, he did it in a way that largely refused to bow to the normal narrative of aggressive Republican against defensive Democrat, and he gained a ton of public support while doing so. There was no realistic way to cover this campaign without him coming off far better than John McCain for the same reason that the Boston Celtics get uniformly better press coverage than the Washington Wizards - they’re doing a far better job of the thing that they’re supposed to be doing.
I do suppose that “Celtics Miss Dozens of Shots; Wizards Average Fewer Turnovers Per Game” is another way of writing about this young NBA season. It’s just a terribly stupid and useless one.
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You know how the local TV news people are always in a tizzy when they can work in “the [insert city here] connection”? And they always sound breathlessly excited when they do this? Doesn’t matter how minimal the connection is. If they find a local slant to a national or international story, they’re gonna run with it.
Suddenly Chicago is home base for a president-elect, and noted wonks are flying here to meet with Obama. People spot the Secret Service motorcade around town, and when Obama’s holding meetings at a downtown hotel, there are a dozen squad cars and some black armored vehicles around the perimeter. The CPD security detail will cost the city $1 million. So, what? When the most important political news is coming out of Chicago and not Washington, the Trib is supposed to ignore it? Puhleeze.
And besides, Chicagoans love Obama. We voted for him with mucho gusto. The Tribune could devote fewer inches of coverage to him, but I’ll bet they’re selling more newspapers these days. Given how much the newspaper business sucks, they need a good story. And it’s better to cover presidential transition planning than to put Britney and Paris on page 1 to try to boost newsstand sales, ain’t it?