The Media is Elitist

Coverage of Obama’s First Pound Exposes the Media as Out of Touch

How surprising it is that a political candidate would embrace his wife, right? That’s what you should take out from the overblown coverage of Barack and Michelle Obama embracing after he won the Democratic nomination.

Most interesting has been the coverage of their fist pound, otherwise known as a “dap,” according to Duke University professor of black pop culture, Mark Anthony Neal, quoted in Jon Tilove’s column, which was syndicated in The Cleveland Plain Dealer among other newspapers.

Neal said as he was watching the exchange, “Do you see that? A bunch of folks must be wondering what that means.”

A bunch of folks in the media, anyway.

Neal continued:

I think it speaks to one of the elements of why Obama has been successful. What you’ve seen in the last 20, 25 years is the mainstreaming of black popular culture, so Obama is a product of what I’ll call multiracial blackness.

Sure, black culture has gone mainstream, but the fist pound went mainstream long ago. I’m an 18-year-old suburban white kid, and my own dad does the fist pound with me. We don’t need a whole article explaining what it is.

The media’s confusion over what Obama was doing is a symptom of a larger problem: They are always behind the times.

Time Magazine christened “You” the person of the year for your internet exploits in 2006 years after you began doing them. Even after Time allegedly figured out the web, the mainstream media at large still hasn’t been able to figure out the web, except that it will “kill them.” You still see demagogues like Bill O’Reilly or Buzz Bissinger attack blogs by mentioning what was said in their comments. They don’t even understand the difference between comments and actual posts.

They don’t get it, they never will. As long as politicos and reporters spend all their time at conventions, nit-pick over word choice, get caught up in the campaigns and forget about life, they will be the ones who are out of touch.