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The hoopla over Obama's 100th day in office today - what's on TV?
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A quick check of Google Trends - an interesting snapshot of the most searched for terms on Google - shows that more people are concerned about swine flu than Barack Obama's 100th day as president. Depending on your perspective, that's either understandable, an appalling lack of interest in important issues or just as well.
Officials have been calling the 100th day a "Hallmark holiday," while at the same time making preparations to celebrate it in style, and CNN is falling all over itself to provide coverage. At 4 pm PST / 7 pm EST, CNN will be offering up a prime time event called 'CNN National Report Card.' Tune in and learn how you can give grades to the president, Congress and your local politicians.
After spending the morning in St. Louis at a town hall in a local high school, at 5 pm PST / 8 pm EST Barack Obama will be giving a live press conference from the White House. You can catch it on CNN of course, as well as all of the major networks and the cable news channels. Well, except for Fox. If you're on the east coast. Instead of broadcasting the press conference they will be airing a new drama, 'Lie to Me' and then of course 'American Idol.' That doesn't really affect us here on the west coast. If you prefer your computer to your TV, CNN Live will have it online.
Just how useful is it to mark the president's 100th day in office? We've been doing since Franklin D. Roosevelt after all, so we should know something. Julian E. Zelizer, a Princeton history professor, sums it up for me. "We'll have to see what happens in the second and third 100 days, which are perhaps more instructive in evaluating a presidency as the shine from the election fades and political tensions over the details of an administration's agenda harden." Luckily Obama has a high enough approval rating - around 2/3 - to carry some momentum into the days ahead. And frankly, it's the slogging hard work in the days ahead that interests me the most, even though I rarely pass an opportunity to see Obama on TV.
And for sheer entertainment value I enjoyed Joseph Romm, writing about global warming for Grist. "Since the establishment media doesn’t get global warming — seeing it mostly through the lens of their standard drama- and personality-driven coverage focused on the ephemeral (did Obama “blink” on earmarks, Newt Gingrich faces off vs. Al Gore ) — and since establishment historians almost by definition focus on the past, the overwhelming majority of “first 100 days” articles you will read are irrelevant exercises in navelgazing."
So what's the point of this little "navelgazing" article? To let you know that if you've been unhappy about previous preemptions and prefer to see American Idol over watching the president, you can. To emphasize that this is sort of an important day, and sort of not, and that the media tends toward overblown coverage of whatever is going on. They want a big story, so there will be lots of coverage of a news conference that hasn't even made it into the public's top 100 Google searches (that's you and me, people), and there will be lots of coverage of swine flu. Possibly the 36,000 people who die annually from seasonal flu (or their friends and families) wish there was more attention paid to what happened to them. Or not. We'll never know. It doesn't make good TV.
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