This is probably going to become a recurring topic, like “Friday Music Videos” and “Cool Thing from the Internet” and has largely been inspired by the weekend #CNNfail.

So I just finished reading this piece in Slate by Christopher Beam about President Obama’s political strategies.  In it, the author points out that Obama often illustrates his points by saying that fixing this one problem X will help solve other problems A, B, and C.  This is all true and accurate.  The Media Fail bit comes in when the author then goes on to spend the entire rest of the article talking political baseball and the relative merits and demerits of this as a strategy to get bills passed.

The correct response of course, would be to simply acknowledge that what Obama’s saying is A) incredibly true, and B) has been largely ignored by the Washington establishment since the advent of the “win the news cycle” campaign.  So instead of getting a substantive piece about how this new/retro strategy of admitting things are interconnected will likely yield significant gains to policy devising, and how it marks a welcome change that should hopefully reduce some of the “law of unintended consequences” blowback we’ve been getting from so many government policies recently.

Fortunately Mr. Beam decided to spare his readers that kind of analysis in favor of some boilerplate false equivalency (Bush had a narrative!  Obama has a plan!  They’re the same!) and some breathless “who’ll win the legislative battle?” lines.  Thanks dude.  For srsly.

Tags: christopher beam, media fail, slate.com