[venus]

You could replace "Obama" with pretty any other PM or president of any country on earth, mix around the current affairs to suit, and your comment would be just as true.

Welcome to media-driven representative democracy. And when I say "representative", I mean the media represents us, which it basically does. And when the media gets tired of a story, after a few days or weeks, they move onto something else, and so do we, and so do the politicians. That is their job, and that is what we expect from them, as voted by us through our support for the media, who represents us.

Democracy depends on scrutiny, accountability, long-term follow-up. It's a problem.

[graycat]

At times I've blurted out that the most serious problem facing Western Civilization now is the news media, journalism, that fails to provide the information needed by well informed citizens.

My hope is that the Internet will make the needed information available and that enough citizens will get and use the information to get the government we need to meet the challenges of our current world.

E.g., the OP points out some of Obama's superficial nonsense, and we discuss it here. Much more such activity, and Obama will have to think twice and talk once, and we might be on the way to better government.

[ochiba]

For further reading on this topic, I can highly recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman.

http://www.amazon.com/Amusing-Ourselves-Death-Discourse-Busi...

[graycat]

Looks good.

With great strain I omitted my usual rants about the role of formula fiction -- e.g., a good guy, white hat, with a problem, and a bad guy, black hat -- and morality plays -- evil, sinful humans transgressing against the pure, pristine, precious, sensitive, delicate, snow white, 100% all-natural environment by wasteful, selfish use of filthy carbon, with retribution the destruction of the planet, and redemption through sacrifice of getting rid of cars and returning to bicycles and horses -- in journalism.

Journalism usually fails standard high school term paper writing standards, e.g., the role of primary references.

For nearly all important work in our society, original research in mathematics or physical science, professional engineering, medicine, finance, law, the standards of quality in journalism are laughable. An airplane designed with the techniques of journalism would never get off the ground, which would be a very good thing.

We could go on and on.

The book mentioned TV: My ISP gave me a cable TV set top box with their special deal for lower cost than service without TV, but I've never connected a TV to the box! I haven't watched TV in months and not much for years. The set top box has a good clock!