Welcome to "Eat the Press". My name is Harry, I'll be your server. Everything's fresh, except the stuff that's been on the site since beta testing, but that's good, too.
A little about the menu. The appetizers are what I like to call "Found Objects", pieces of audio and/or video that illustrate the news-making process at work. Media people have always delighted in presenting us with the incautiously recorded moments of politicians and celebrities; this section represents just a tasty bit of table-turning. These pieces are presented raw, and without unnecessary chopping, so enjoy.
For the entrees we have for you the freshest looks at the stories the media is covering, why and how they're covering them, and what they're not covering. We've taken off the menu both the "gee, we did the horserace story again too often during the campaign" dishes and the extra-salty "they're biased against the left/they're biased against the right" stews you may have been gorging on lately.
In the spirit of the venue, we're looking for your observations and contributions. If you're in the media business, and have a tasty story of the sausage-making process, this would be a fine place to serve it up. If you're a reader or viewer who sees more than Howard Kurtz or Eric Burns does, come on in and help out with the dishes.
Beyond the soon-to-be-very-tired food metaphors, there's an idea here: The idea is that the media have an agenda, all right, and it has precious little to do with poltical issues, at least the political issues of the outside world. It's an agenda, like that of most professions, that has to do with the politics, the economics, and the esthetics of the people who populate the profession itself. I hope most of what appears here is faithful to good old Occam's Razor--choose the simplest theory that fits the known facts. Plenty of time for windy theorizing later, and elsewhere.
Soup's on.
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