If It's Tuesday, It's Boehlert!

100 days of the media's trivial pursuit:

[T]he Obama coverage has often featured a toxic combination of trivial pursuit with a passion for process. The results have, at times, been gruesome, with the news media obsessing over White House iPods, and fashion "showdowns," and puppies, and soft drinks, and parking lots, and condoms, and hand gestures, and gaffes, and laughs, and celebrity magazines, and teleprompters, and rounds of golf, and sleeveless dresses, on and on. The list of press inanities has grown quite long in just 100 days.

It's been distressing to watch the emergence of the media's permanent -- preferred -- state of trivial pursuit and the suddenly open assumption that trivia, often in the name of process, is just as important and noteworthy as actual news.

The trend has been impossible to escape, and even some journalists have acknowledged it. But they've suggested that it simply reflects our sped-up, lightning-fast media landscape and that new technology is forcing reporters and pundits to make instant calculations and premature political pronouncements.

Baloney.

Read the whole thing here.