and now, the news

[calimac]

Yesterday the Innerwebs were full of nothing so much as Obama's Nobel Peace Prize, the reactions thereto, and how "He got it for not being Bush" was such a tired old line within two hours of the announcement being made.

But how did it affect the print newspapers?

The news came out just too late to make our Friday morning paper. Today, Saturday, the news story is buried on page three under the dull and uninformative headline, "Peace prize lauds change in U.S. policy," next to other stories with the equally dull headlines "President calls for consumer protection" and "Troop levels in Afghanistan still undecided." I can hardly bring myself to bother to read these, and begin to wonder how the President can do his job without expiring of sheer ennui. How about if he decided to act like a Nobel Peace laureate, and took action which would result in a headline of "Troop levels in Afghanistan reduced to zero"? I'd read that. Even "President calls for 'caveat emptor' consumer policy" would at least be interesting.

The main story on the front page discusses the continued gridlock in state government - no news there - but one of the smaller of the feature stories occupying the rest of the page does concern the reaction to the prize, and is given the even duller and more generic headline, "Benefit or burden for Obama?" This is so dull I didn't even notice the story was there the first two times I glanced over the front page.

In other words, had my computer or internet connection been down, or had I been too busy yesterday to go online - which I almost was, having been out most of the day - and had I not been looking for it in today's paper, I might still not even know about the peace prize. The moral of this story is, that if I want to know what's going on in the world, I either have to scour the newspapers with toothpicks holding my eyelids open, or sit at the computer all day.

I was out of the country and not attending to news sources during Katrina. Several days later I arrived at a hotel with a television on and saw footage of water in the New Orleans streets. "What happened?" I asked. "Did the big hurricane they've always feared hit?"

Comments

[stevegreen.livejournal.com]

Reminds me of the Monday back in the mid-90s when Ann and I were travelling back from a convention. I switched the car radio on and heard references to tanks in Red Square. Instant bafflement: none of the news about the attempt to seize power from Gorbachev had reached us that morning.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That, ironically, was the first news event I followed primarily on the Internet.

[jpmassar.livejournal.com]

The SF Chronicle has pretty much given up on national headline news on the front page.

And your implied observation that news gets stale really quickly seems more and more true. Still, I was a bit surprised not to see a big headline about the peace prize on the front page.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And my paper isn't even the Chronicle. It's the San Jose Mercury-News.

In the train yesterday, I picked up a discarded Examiner for something to read, and discovered that this tabloid paper's policy is to put a huge headline on the front cover with nothing but a small column-item relating to it inside.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

The "benefit or burden?" story made it to the front page of the Seattle Times. I believe it was an LA Times story. It looked so tired I offered it a cup of coffee, but it didn't have the energy to accept the offer.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

I heard about the Nobel Peace Prize on the radio driving home from work that morning. My friends on Facebook continue to have a kerfluffle about it with the lefties in favor and the righties against.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Curious. On the main discussion I've followed, there has been pretty much across the spectrum agreement that Obama has done nothing to justify the award.

I first saw it mentioned on a libertarian Web site, and I thought they were making some arcane joke at Obama's expense. I followed up one of their links and got what looked like a straight news story, but that could have been a well done parody site. It was only after I decided I had better check, and hit Google News, that I got to the "what were they smoking in Oslo?" stage.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I expect that there's a difference between "Obama has done nothing to justify the award" and being positively against it. Many that I have read have taken it in the way it was intended, as a signal of respect for the change he has wrought in the international discourse, and a sign of hope and encouragement for future achievements, which is not incompatible with thinking that it was premature at this time.

As for people actively disgusted by it, I find they fall into three camps:
1) Republicans
2) The Taliban
3) Leftists, i.e. those beyond liberal

Strange bedfellows indeed.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Actually, that sounds like a very predictable set of bedfellows to me.

I fall into the "both worse and better choices are easy to find" camp, myself.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"Strange" and "predictable" are not incompatible here.

I prefer to emphasize "strange".

[neanderthalus.livejournal.com]

sardines. I think they smoke sardines in Norway.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Do you know n6tqs's story about 9/11? Essentially, he checked into a hotel in London in London's early morning of 9/11/01, by prearrangement, and woke up in mid-afternoon London time. By the time he got down to the tube, all the papers had sold out, the previous day's headlines were on the newspaper kiosks, and signs everywhere said "All flights to the United States have been cancelled."

He could not figure out what could have happened.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

No, I don't recall his having mentioned that in my presence.

On a far more trivial level, I have that reaction to many celebrities. Celebrities, in Daniel Boorstin's classic formulation, are people well-known for their well-knownness, so media references do not have to explain who they are. But if their rise to celebrity takes place off my radar, I always retain a disturbing sense of not being sure who this person is, or why they're famous, even after it's explained to me.