Originally published on the CGS blog on May 3, 2007.
I have been a news junkie extraordinaire for far too many years. I admit my addiction, but there is no way I can break it. Even as a kid, I would run to the door each morning to grab The Detroit Free Press and begin to devour the news. At that early stage, I went right to the sports section. I had to check every columnist, carefully ingest each and every box score and memorize the top 10 leaders in home runs, goals scored, or scoring in the NBA depending upon the season.
As I grew older, the sports section has become my dessert. The main course for me is the front page, followed by the editorial and op-ed pages. With the internet, I can even get a handle on the daily news coverage around the world before 6 AM each morning (I am cursed, as I can’t sleep past 5 AM most mornings).
Over the past few years, logging onto the internet to check the news from papers all across our interconnected world has become quite depressing. With the daily death tolls in Iraq on the rise to disease and poverty ravaging our brothers and sisters in developing nations, I often find myself in a funk before my first cup of coffee is even finished.
This morning, E.J. Dionne, who writes a column for the Washington Post and is a scholar at The Brookings Institute, had a piece entitled “Democrats’ Foreign Policy Primary.” The headline caught my interest, but frankly, as I read E.J.’s column and normally I love his wit and insight there was a complete disconnect between the headline and what E.J. was articulating.
What Dionne focuses on is solely the Democratic positioning in regards to Iraq. He devotes less that one paragraph to Senator Obama’s “detailed foreign policy speech last week“
In fact, many candidates on both sides of the aisle have delivered big-picture foreign policy speeches: Obama, Hilary Clinton, John McCain , “America’s Mayor” and Bill Richardson . Yet, while the media clamors for depth and substance from the candidates, the press falls short when it comes to actually covering and analyzing the views of the people who are running for president.
So, I guess this morning’s “funk” was given a moment of hope, only to be dashed by the Post’s misleading headline on Dionne’s column.
