CNN’s Jeff Greenfield’s lengthy segment on Barack Obama’s casual wear, and its similarity to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s no-tie look, raised quite a few eyebrows over the last couple of days. The good news is Greenfield heard the criticism and chose to respond. The bad news is he missed the point of the criticism. Badly.
Greenfield insisted he was just kidding, and that it was obvious that the 2-and-a-half minute segment was meant in jest. Overly-sensitive bloggers, Greenfield said, just didn’t appreciate the seamless way in which he seamlessly blended satire and clever political analysis.
Is some of this my fault? It has to be, for the same reason famed Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach liked to say that when someone misses a pass, 90 per cent of the time it’s the fault of the passer.
I figured there was no way on planet Earth that anyone could possibly take such a presentation at face value. I was wrong.
Most of what happened here, I think, is a demonstration of the hair-trigger instincts that have grown up among some of the bloggers (not to mention the need to fill all that space every day, or hour, or 15 minutes).
In a political world where partisans routinely assume the worst about their adversaries –and where conspiracy theories stretch from Bill Clinton as a drug ring- and murder-enabler to Bush as planner of 9/11 — there’s a tendency to find malice aforethought.
I like to consider myself someone with a fairly good sense of humor, and reading the transcript of Greenfield’s segment, I did not literally believe that the CNN analyst believed that Obama was going for the “Ahmadinejad look.”
Greenfield seems to have misunderstood why many of us were annoyed with his piece in the first place.
Greenfield didn’t just make an off-hand joke during an on-air discussion, he went to the trouble of putting together a lengthy segment in which he fleshed out his joke in great detail. This may have been a valiant attempt at humor, but as with many failed jokes, there was a problem with delivery — The Situation Room is not The Onion.
There’s also the political/media context to consider. A lot of Dems have seen the media participate in some ugly smears of Democratic presidential hopefuls, and despite his generally positive press thus far, Obama’s turn to get smacked around by objective news outlets was inevitable. Some on the right have already started to revel in the similarities between “Obama” and “Osama,” coupled by the fact that the senator’s middle name is “Hussein.” Right on the heels of this nonsense, Greenfield thought it’d be funny to compare Obama’s and Ahmadinejad’s fashion choices, playing into the notion that the Democrat has a great deal in common with our Middle Eastern foes.
Indeed, the same afternoon as Greenfield’s extended parody, CNN also ran split-screens with Obama, bin Laden, and Saddam. For those of us waiting for the media to start undermining Obama’s chances, CNN’s choice of jokes, segments, and visuals seemed to have all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. Meant in jest or not, as TNR’s Michael Crowley put it, “[O]n some level I’m sure this stuff sinks in.” Indeed, it does, and CNN should know better to play into far-right memes by going for cheap laughs.
CNN is supposed to be the real, credible news network. Maybe it’s best to leave the news parodies to the professionals?
Post Script: By the way, Greenfield’s shot at bloggers — we feel the need “to fill all that space every day, or hour, or 15 minutes” — was cheap and unnecessary. Indeed, this little incident, if anything, demonstrates the problem isn’t with bloggers filling pages, it’s with news networks filling 24/7 airtime. Did CNN so thoroughly cover every major news story on earth on Sunday that the network had time left over for jokes about Obama’s name and clothing? Please.
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