Obama gave a great speech yesterday in New Orleans -- the best in months. He was perfect: energized, in tune with the crowd, managed to talk about the differences between his administration and Bush's without seeming mean or petty. He came across as the leader I remember from the campaign.
There was a remarkable moment when he magnanimously quieted the crowd that was being hostile to Governor Jindal. He rose above the fray with great confidence and good humor. He was awesome. I was chanting along "Rev'd up, ready to go!" (and no it didn't seem old).
It was so great I turned on FOX just to see how their commenters were going to handle it. How were they going to cope with the enthusiasm and clear evidence that this Crowd Loved Obama!
Then BalloonBoy happened. BalloonBoys, unfortunately, do Happen. Maybe it was a hoax, maybe not. Whatever, the networks have a real problem: how to deal with BalloonBoy eruptions.
The fact that all of the cable networks react in the same way to cases like Balloonboy results in a virtual shutdown on the entire news making apparatus. It's almost worse when it's something like a police chase, because there is usually no human interest aspect at all.
Shouldn't there be a better way of dealing with this? Maybe there could be a special channel which deals with nothing but such events. Maybe the news networks could enter into an agreement in which one of them follows the story and the others allude to the fact its being covered on XYZ network. Then if that network experiences a 1) revenue or 2) ratings bump, these are 1) allocated among the networks and/or 3) left out of the statistics.
At any rate, there really should be a better way of handing these kinds of situations than the way it's being done now [where have I heard that before?] I'm curious to know what others think.