Conclusion: The Only People Affected By Blathering Pundits, Are Blathering Pundits

by Glynnis MacNicol | 9:10 am, June 21st, 2010

» 7 comments

If you are reading this post you are probably aware that after President Obama‘s Oval Office address last week just about every pundit and anchor on MSNBC did a 180* and turned on the president. Headline news! Foreshadowing certain doom for the Dems in November. Except did it matter? Probably not to the country at large. Or even the country at medium.

Turns out that in much the same way many people (ahem) don’t know who’s winning at baseball until the World Series begins, the majority of the population is actually not paying attention to the daily ups and downs of the Obama administration. From yesterday’s Times:

Martin Kaplan, the director of the Norman Lear Center at the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California, said, “I think the most important impact of Washington commentators is on other Washington commentators.”

Mr. Kaplan said that if the MSNBC commentator Keith Olbermann was upset by “what the Obama speech did or didn’t contain, then every person who is booking a guest or framing an article is affected by that.”

Short version: the cablesphere is talking to hear itself talk…and the public isn’t listening. Also, they don’t trust the press so much.

“Obama couldn’t get a break from any of the national commentators,” [Dennis Ryerson] said. “So I was surprised when I saw a poll today that showed that Obama’s approval rating didn’t change that much. I don’t know if anyone has figured out the impact of the new information order when you have so many opinions out there.”
[...]
But, [Martin Kaplan] added, “I think the impact of the various conventional wisdoms of Washington is far less, because people have so many places to turn to.”

Also complicating matters is the mistrust of the news media: it is at an all-time high. Many Americans are more likely to assume that anyone they read or see on television has a political bias.

Short version: No one in the Oval Office had a Cronkite moment after “losing” Keith Olbermann.

Cable TV, keith olbermann, New York Times

ex political-media hack

but, but, but…you guys …well. you guys….are commenting on the commenting..or punditing on the punditing..
goodolgil

Huh? Did that Professor seriously think that Obama’s approval rating was going to take a hit because of negative reaction to his speech on MSNBC?

I’m gonna take this one step further and say the country really doesn’t give a shit about the oil spill. Period. Just like we barely cared about the disastrous Iraq war because it barely affected us, so too is most of the country indifferent to this catastrophic oil spill (outside of the relatively small amount of people directly affected by it).
Moderate

Network providers get minute by minute cable ratings, they know what people are listening to. Even MSNBC, knows that when the parade is headed in one direction and you are going another, there comes a point when you must break off and rejoin the parade. MSNBC does not want to be the only news provider seen as cheerleading for the Obama presidency.
Obama is left hoping there are lots of Alvin Greene type of voters, sadly there are far too many that have no idea who they are voting for.
goodolgil

“Even MSNBC, knows that when the parade is headed in one direction and you are going another, there comes a point when you must break off and rejoin the parade. ”

LOL. So when did Fox News join that parade with with every disastrous Bush policy exactly?
BatBoy

“… with with…”

So when did Fox News join that parade with with every disastrous Bush policy exactly?

They did did…quite oftenoften…you were just watching watching too much MSNBC to know know!
http://twitter.com/SailRabbits Magister

@goodolgil: I thought that I had commented on it earlier, but a quick look-see isn’t finding where I put it it.

Nonetheless, I agree that though we’re all concerned, the oil spill/disaster is only truly important to those affected and that’s why the rest of us don’t want the President to drop all of his other balls, so that he can go down there with a wrench which seems to be what Olbermann and Matthews wanted.

Of course, though, I’d add a subset of the environmental groups, the seafood industry, cable television personalities, airlines and the economic development/tourism from the respective states to those who might be more concerned than the general populace. Though, I’d say that the east and west coast tourism folks, the seafood harvesters along the two coasts, hedge fund operators, the Dawn dishwashing detergent people and the manufacturers of clean-up materials are also interested, but for different reasons.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Bob-Amsel/1450316715 Bob Amsel

I suspect that the title of this article is accurate. I think if we combined the number of regular watchers of Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN together, we’d still have just a drop in the bucket of the actual number of voters in a presidential or mid-term election. Of course, that number would change dramatically if we were comparing “American Idol” to the number of voters.