Hippocrates In San Diego

Bubble News

An interesting series from James Fallows of The Atlantic covers Obama’s trip to Asia, or more specifically the US media’s coverage of the trip. It is making me reconsider some of yesterday’s criticisms of how the Obama administration has been handling human rights issues.

I think Fallows’ well-reasoned and coherent argument is forcing me to realize that Obama’s method of diplomacy won’t result in “wins,” and that speaking out in public would actually be counterproductive given the cultural particulars he would be dealing with in Asia. Perhaps we are seeing US leadership — one that may result in more tangible outcomes than the European Parliament’s resolution on Bat Nha.

The part of the series most interesting to me was the emphasis on how the media completely misinterpreted how Obama’s message (and the presentation of that message) would be received within China. Apparently several media outlets went with an interpretation that Obama’s town hall with 400 Chinese college students was stocked with Party apparatchiks who asked nothing of value and received boilerplate in return, and that the town hall wasn’t seen by anyone anyway because it was carried only on Xinhua, the state television and internet news outlet. Fallows, with some help from some well-placed readers, fairly well deconstructs this interpretation and shows why the media services traveling with the President seem to have gotten the story so wrong.

One safe conclusion about the state of American journalism is that events so far in the 21st century have exposed, and exacerbated, the weaknesses of American journalism as it currently exists. The financial pressures faced by media organizations, as part of larger corporate families, to maximize the numbers of eyes, clicks, or pages turned, combined with the apparent inability of many beat journalists to understand the topics on which they’re reporting, helps result in an increasingly uninformed population (which bears much responsibility in its own right for keeping the demand for shoddy journalism high). Ironic, isn’t it, that while in China Obama explained that the free flow of information on the Internet helps strengthen the roots of American democracy, he’s faced with surmounting a stifled flow of information from his own White House because the press corps can’t get the story right.