President Barack Obama giving the State of the Union address on Tuesday night. Behind him (left) Vice President Joe Biden and Speaker John Boehner
Media analysis of the State of the Union (SOTU) address by the President of the United States (POTUS) is an annual ritual which has acquired farcical proportions. The fun begins with the abbreviations SOTU and POTUS. (I have added an S for Speeches to make the two rhyme in the headline.)
Both the broadcast and print media deploy hundreds of journalists and commentators to parse every presidential phrase and check every coma, colon, semicolon and anything that resembles a punctuation mark. If the SOTUS were a person he or she would have had every orifice examined.
I watch both the SOTU and the analyses that follow them as a form of entertainment. Invariably, I feel deep post-sotual fatigue. It is particularly amusing to see the huge line-up of experts on CNN panels. You will never find the panel less than eight experts. What is really funny is that within the bounds of studio etiquette each tries to out-wisemouth the other. They all offer their perspectives with earnestness and assurance which tell you that there is no wisdom left on this particular subject of the SOTU once they have opined. And then pops up the next expert.
While independent experts on cable news have the freedom to express subjective opinions, it becomes particularly humorous when their professional correspondents have to go to ridiculous lengths to make it sound that they are offering purely objective analysis devoid of any personal bias. Unless you are an electronically generated human voice, like the audio version of this post, it is not possible to be that objective.
It is not as if only television news has an ever expanding opinionated girth. Even the print and online media now race to outdo each other in assigning any number of commentators to say their bit. The Daily Beast, a popular news and current affairs website run by Tina Brown for instance, has ten commentators offering their perspectives on how well they think President Barack Obama did. More often than not such analyses sound as if the analysts feel betrayed that the president was not entertaining or captivating enough. They seem to forget that the SOTUS are not stand-up shticks.
In some ways I am reminded of the laughable obsession that the Indian media displays for the annual budget speeches by the finance minister of the day. Equally ridiculous is that within minutes of the budget speech being delivered reporters fan out the streets to seek “common man’s” reaction (The expression common man has to be outlawed) as if they have the time and skill to digest that humongous document so quickly.
The SOTUS by the POTUS is nothing more than an annual statement of the obvious with some loosely defined aspirational objectives. They are important as far as they go. (See, how I brought in my current favorite expression as far as it goes).
P.S.: I have used two words that do not exist in the dictionary—post-sotual and out-wisemouth. Any future user should remember to send me a royalty check.