Obamedia ignores the perfect segue

 

... Meanwhile, President Obama is in Hawaii

Where are the obvious transitions, the segues that TV news loves so much?

I’ve seen them so strained that while anchoring a newscast I once refused to read a segue that went from Thanksgiving dinner to a double fatal car accident. It went something like this, “One local family will not be enjoying their Thanksgiving dinner because they were killed while driving south on I-15.”  Yes — not this year’s dinner, or next year’s or the year after. Producers in newsrooms consider it an art to be able to tie stories together so that the viewers can feel the “flow” of a newscast. Many producers take great delight in being able to tie stories together that have no natural tie. Yes, we have all seen new anchors strain at trying to tie stories together.

Now the strain is to totally ignore the perfect segue.

I’ve been waiting patiently to see one of the net’s do this Blizzard Of 2010 story and follow it with …” Meanwhile, President Obama is in Hawaii playing his 4th or 5th round of golf during his vacation.” Hummmmm. Haven’t seen that yet.

 

Note: For such a view, one has to travel outside the Obamedia's hermetically sealed ideological box, to a still-free press elsewhere. For instance, see the Telegraph (UK) :  "Barack Obama's family holiday in Hawaii is reportedly costing at least $1.5 million as mainland America is battered by storms" -- and the similarly critical opinion of Nile Gardiner that "Barack Obama... lacks true grit in the face of America's enemies."

 

Good Morning America had both the snow story and an Obama story in their opening segment on Monday, but they painfully put a story about stolen fertility eggs between Storm Watch2010 and Obama’s support of Michael Vick.  A natural transition lost, or intentionally avoided. Do not believe things like this happen by accident. Placement of stories are carefully considered to give a newscast the flow that they so badly want.  In this case, flow was ignored to protect Dear Leader.

The same media that blasted George W. Bush every time there was a wildfire out west, is giving full cover for Obama who is either body surfing in the bay or lining up a 15 foot putt while Americans from the mid-west to the east coast are slip sliding away and hoping they can dig out by spring.

This kind of bias is the most difficult to prove and thus the toughest to spot, but you know it when you see it (or don’t see it) ....

 

[Segue to] Politico on what we don't see of Obama in Hawaii:

The extent of President Barack Obama's low profile over the holidays was driven home Sunday when he signed into law a major legislative achievement — the 9/11 benefits bill — alone in the privacy of his Hawaiian vacation home.

Obama was surrounded not by jubilant members of Congress who helped facilitate the bill's passage but by palm trees.

The scene, captured in a single photograph released by the White House, followed a pattern this year of cutting back on images of Obama during his annual holiday vacation.

Opportunities to photograph the president have been so curtailed that local news outlets have had no choice but to use images from last year, and there still has not been a single image of the entire first family.

The result has been 11 days during which Obama has been kept mostly out of the public eye — the longest amount of time since taking office.

 

President Barack Obama signs H.R. 847, the “James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act” in Kailua, Hawaii, Jan. 2, 2011 ...

This official White House photograph is being made available only for publication by news organizations and/or for personal use printing by the subject(s) of the photograph. The photograph may not be manipulated in any way and may not be used in commercial or political materials, advertisements, emails, products, promotions that in any way suggests approval or endorsement of the President, the First Family, or the White House.

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Interesting coincidence: yesterday, I read in our local paper that more than 40 percent (!) of all Missouri high school graduates are so deficient in math or reading skills that, when they get to college, they require at least one remedial course. Today I read this very instructive post on segues. Taken together, the two stories give us a pretty fair idea of what has happened to dumb down the American electorate in recent years. What has happened is an almost criminal failure to teach our kids how to read and how to deal with numbers. Reading skills and math skills are the entry point into reasoning skills. If the news anchors on TV knew how to reason, they'd realize that most of the segues that come out of their mouths are non sequiturs -- fatuous statements that attempt to link unlinkables. They'd realize that much of what they're spewing out every day is illogical, sophistic, casuistic, and downright nutty. And maybe, just maybe, thinking people could once again listen to the nightly news without squirming. Our country's in bad shape -- and it'll stay in bad shape until we correct the problem of giving first-rate youngsters third-rate educations. As it is, many of our young people are graduating from college without even knowing that such things as non sequiturs exist. Bringing down the deficit, balancing the budget, and quashing wasteful spending are all essential, but they're not going to touch an even more fundamental problem: We are cheating our kids of their rightful heritage.