How Many Reporters Does It Take to Cover a Beer Summit?
Sheesh!! I really did think NYT’s three reporters to liveblog the "beer summit" took the cake.
I was wrong. The AP far outdid the NYT.
By PHILIP ELLIOTT, Associated Press Writer
[snip]
Associated Press writers Ben Feller, Cal Woodward, Darlene Superville, Jennifer Loven, Liz Sidoti and Charles Babington in Washington and Karen Testa in Boston contributed to this report.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight!
Eight reporters! It takes eight reporters to cover a stupid photo op!
I bow in awe to Obama’s press team. They made a vice principal having a beer with two poorly behaved children a nation obsession! They even got EW to do two back to back posts on the Beer Summit! Nothing else happening in DC today?
Boxturtle (Grinning, ducking and running)
Liz “Sprinkles” Sidoti was a mccain fluffer
and Charles “Chuckles” Babington is one of the biggest hacks at the ass – ociated press ( along with fournier, nedra pickler and a finance guy whose name i cannot remember. )
the ap is just circling the drain these days. i cannot wait until it is gone.
And Feller lurvs him some GW Bush.
It’s a strange world we live in.
And we wonder why the MSM covers so many stories so poorly…
I am reminded of the first thing I learned about playing soccer: play your position, not the ball. If you play the ball, everyone on the team ends up in the same place, giving the other team a wide open field to blow past you. It appears reporters should have paid better attention in gym class. Eight reporters on an Entertainment Weekly sort of story means there is a lot of real reporting not getting done…
Not sure they’re covering this story poorly. For whatever reason, the beer summit has caught attention. Ask ten people on the street what the latest healthcare package looks like, maybe one could tell you. But I bet ALL of them could tell you that Obama drinks Bud Light. The presstitutes are giving us what we ask for.
Boxturtle (EPU’d from the last thread)
You misunderstood me. IMO the beer fest has been a total waste of everyone’s time. By putting 8 reporters on a photo op, they are not doing real reporting on other stories that would actually have some value… Whether it is on police excesses, racial profiling, the effects of travel-induced sleep-deprivation on one’s social skills, knee-jerk reactions by the chattering classes on an off-the-cuff remark by political figures, or other topics entirely such as health care, foreign wars, detainee treatment, covering up Bush era crimes here and abroad, etc. It is the topics that don’t get covered because 8 (11 including the AP and the NYT, and presumably the number goes up exponentially from there, with other outlets) are wasting their time and ours. It is no different than chasing OJ’s SUV or Jackson’s body or any of the other vacuous hours consumed when a few minutes would suffice.
It is not being done unintentionally (shiny object?). There is method to the madness.
This is also a good time to hit somebody in the nuts, when they’re least expecting it.
I disagree. The Beltway (and Hollywood, and perhaps the rest of the country) is driven by the cult of personality. EW once provided the opportunity at her old place for some of us to chat with a WH reporter. It was abundantly clear that they sincerely believe that repeating whatever the WH says, hanging on the President’s every videotaped landing and departure, has value. I respectfully disagreed. I really don’t see any of this as a conspiracy, just the vapid evolution driven by a 24 hour news cycle, where pictures are everything and complicated content (like a coherent and honest policy discussion) is too hard to make look pretty. The newspapers have simply followed suit.
J’accuse les médias.
Four person discussion groups of empathy building is going to take a long time for change. And, I got to admit an bit of resentment that people like Marcy and Bmaz don’t get equal facetime!
Eight beautiful reporters!!!
Bwahahahaha . . .
Dang. That’s what I was thinking of.
Off to add a graphic of the Count.
Three! Three rotten apples the NYT counted.
Eight bumbling AP’s
Seven days of coverage
Six ways from Hell
Five Golden Rahm’s
Four beer consumers
Three stupid Timesers
Two sides of all
At the party on the Rose Garden lawn.
Nice work, just needs a YouTube production.
Can any of the eight reporters tell me what Biden was snacking on?
Lucky Charms. They’re magically delicious.
What I heard is that they were all snacking on peanuts.
I, for one, am glad that Biden was included and was drinking a non-alcoholic beer.
I’ve been drinking beer for more than 40 years, but in recent years I’ve had to switch to NA beer for medical reasons. If it weren’t for NA beer, I couldn’t have any beer at all.
Bob in HI
I wonder how many reporters it takes to screw in a light bulb?
Ask General Electric.
How big is the light bulb?
OT to this post but additional info to a previous post
A Yale Law School faculty member and military law expert said he is disturbed by allegations that Fort Lewis employed a civilian who spied on an Olympia-based anti-war organization.
http://www.theolympian.com/sou…..25066.html
Eugene R. Fidell, a former judge advocate for the Coast Guard and the president of the National Institute of Military Justice, said such a practice appeared to violate the Posse Comitatus Act, a federal law that prohibits the use of the Army for conventional law enforcement activities against civilians.
Last week, members of Olympia Port Militarization Resistance presented evidence that John J. Towery, a civilian employee of Fort Lewis Force Protection, infiltrated the group using an assumed name and conducted surveillance of its members for about two years.
Working on a f-up to that post.
Would not one reporter and a camera person have been enough? They could have all shared the pictures its not like a bunch of guys drinking beer is so photo worthy you need more pictures. The Press writes constant stores about unions having to many people assigned to do one job and loosing their companies money.
So instead of 8 reporters from the AP and three from the Times 2 people and the AP and times share coverage would be much more efficient.
We could put the other reporters to work covering healthcare.
Two, four, six, eight
let’s all participate! YEA!
Can’t you just see the scantyclad girls jumping with pompoms
No, but it would be a definite improvement over what I did see.
And by the way, I am quite disappointed in one and all here not referring to them as “Mental Midgets of the Media”!
So many reporters, so little news.
Did any of these reporters pick up on the fact that Sgt. Crowley saw fit to bring his union rep with him.
I thought adding Joe Biden to yesterday’s little beer party was a nice touch. Unfortunately old Joe tried to keep up with the younger guys and had to be helped back home. This morning he called in sick.
Non-alcoholic “beer” affected him that way huh.
Wouldn’t you be sick from drinking NA beer?
Blecchhh…I know I would. I tried it when I was pregnant and it made me queasy; tried it after kid was born, still made me queasy.
Never been a fan of beer NA or not.
When pregnant, I enjoyed Bitburger Drive.
http://www.bitburger.com/bitbu…..index.html
Biden was added for even racial distribution.
Good point!
There was even racial distribution before Biden joined in. With Biden it became 2.5 to 1.5 distribution.
I just watched the video of all those reporters shooting their pictures.
I think I’ve decide not to run for the office of president after all.
Hufingtonpost has another contempt of cop story. This time, it is a white lawyer in Washington speaking his mind about cops in a public place. The police officer charged him with disorderly conduct.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…..46794.html
There is one of these incidents somewhere every minute of every day. Exactly why I was wailing about the lost point in this whole mess from Obama’s self interjection.
You could power Cleveland with the effort I’ve put into ignoring this whole story —mainly because of what I take to be bmaz’s point, that the individual tale is unexceptional while the story of the social phenomenon doesn’t get told.
But 8?! Way past Kane covering Susan Alexander’s debut, and so far as serving some media moguls’ interest is concerned, in about the same clay-ass.
All those people covering the get-together and not one mentions the president wiping his left hand on his pants leg. Don’t they use napkins at the White House? I kept expecting a close up and some kind of remark focusing on the really important news.
Newspapers, web sites, and other media are paying the AP for access to their reporting. Are they getting their money’s worth? Even if the public is really, really, really interested in the “beer summit”, can’t a single reporter write an entertaining article that everyone in the syndicate can use, freeing up the other reporters to write something about health care, or Afghanistan, or the problems states are having with their budgets, or something?
Clue: The reichwing’s watching with eagle eyes for any/all fails on PBO’s part. The media was staking out the Biergarten in hopes of catching a slip/fall on live TV.