Tuesday, July 28, 2009

The Birther Explosion: If the Media Covers It, It’s News

For media watchers, the dramatic escalation of the ‘birther’ story is a fascinating study in the continued capacity of the traditional media to steer the national discourse.

When I wrote about the ‘Triangle’ in 2005, I was describing the online community’s inability to drive the national debate without the participation of the media and political establishment. The corollary was that the media could single-handedly bring an issue to the fore. Apparently that hasn’t changed much, in spite of the premature celebration over their supposed demise. Case(s) in point: Michael Jackson, birthers, Gates arrest.

Writing about the Gates arrest, I said this:

On NBC’s Today Show, host Matt Lauer asserted that the Gates story is getting the attention that the White House hoped would be paid to the health care debate. That is the typical self-referential game the media have played for years, where they push one issue over another then innocently ask why it’s getting more focus. It’s what happened with the Swift-Boating of John Kerry: major news outlets gave unlimited coverage to Kerry’s attackers, then had the audacity to step back and ask why the story ‘had legs.’

I know reporters love process stories, but if Lauer genuinely thought health care was more important, he could have featured it and avoided the solipsistic analysis of how one story was stepping on another. If he thought race relations and profiling were more newsworthy, he could have simply said so and prioritized that. But you can’t be both the source of the news and the dispassionate observer commenting on why one story derails another, detached from your own choices.

Similarly, the online commentariat (on blogs, Twitter, media sites, YouTube, and other communication platforms) still largely depend on traditional media for news and information and tend to flow in the direction of media coverage, amplifying the chatter of the day, whether Michael Jackson, Sarah Palin or the Gates arrest.

The birther story has been amped up by cable news, and the online community has followed suit. We’ll know we’ve reached a tipping point (still far off) when the media hypes something, the online commentariat hypes something else, and the latter becomes the center of national attention.

Topics: media, obama, birther, birth-certificate