A few years ago (2003 or 2004), I went down to Spring Training with Blez, one of my best friends and editor of Athletics Nation. This was when we were just starting SB Nation, when sports operations gave bloggers zero respect or credibility.
A's general manager Billy Beane had taken a liking to Blez, and had arranged for him to have field access before a Spring Training game to interview some players. The team's media hack, on the other hand, seemed deeply offended that a "blogger" would be given access, and did everything to make Blez's life difficult. But eventually he was on the field.
He joined a media scrum around team star Erik Chavez, and suffered through their questions: Who do you pick to win the NCAA championship? Have you heard this recording of teammate Barry Zito's band? And so it went. Finally, Blez interjected: "You've been having a hard time hitting left-handed pitchers the past few seasons. Are you doing anything to better adjust to left-handers?"
A real baseball question! Shocked by this development, the media scrum immediately dissipated. Apparently their readers wanted just fluff and were uninterested in, you know, baseball. The result? Many of those fluff-loving media outlets are on the way to oblivion (the San Francisco Chronicle probably won't survive April), while SB Nation is experiencing insane growth -- now at 2.5 million monthly uniques.
It's a disconnect from reporters who supposedly exist to inform their readers, and the readers themselves. And it's a disconnect that has long been rampant in the political realm. Chuck Todd's question Tuesday night was, in many ways, the perfect encapsulation of that disconnect. Froomkin notes:
My favorite moment came when Obama took on one of the more bizarre tenets of the Washington punditocracy: The belief that the willingness to call for public sacrifice in moments of crisis is in itself a key moral litmus test for a president.
On The Washington Post op-ed pages alone, David S. Broder has called former president George W. Bush's refusal to do so after 9/11 his "greatest moral failing," and, more recently, Ruth Marcus and Jackson Diehl scolded Obama for not asking for shared sacrifice to address the economic crisis.
The notion that the American people aren't sacrificing during this economic crisis is ludicrous to anyone not living inside the Beltway bubble. It's so incomprehensibly stupid that it defies all attempts to fully grasp it. But this is CW in the DC cocktail party circuit. I mean, Todd obviously did his homework prior to the press conference and truly thought he was asking a good question. He wasn't being ironic or clever. He was serious, and in his mind and that of his beltway friends, the American people are seriously having a jolly good time, insulated from any "sacrifice".
Is it any wonder that public displeasure with the traditional media continues to scrape bottom?