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After reading/hearing news coverage of today’s activities I have come to a couple of conclusions. First, I have made a goal to attend a presidential inauguration – not just the parade, but the actual swearing-in ceremony with the inaugural address. I will not be picky about what president it is because for me it will be a celebration of the office and the government of this great nation. Second, I’m sick of the news coverage. The inauguration is certainly newsworthy but aside from some brief description of the crowds, the weather, and possibly some background about previous inaugurations the only coverage that the media can really offer of any value is the text of the inaugural address. (Here’s the official copy.) Besides that nothing that is planned is particularly newsworthy out of these events.
The fact is that this very important celebration is not made more real or valuable to me by all the extra commentary (beyond what I listed above). If the media wants to cover it all day that’s fine, just roll the cameras and stream the audio but get the talking heads off the screen – they have nothing to add.
So, congratulations to President Obama. I hope he enjoys this day and then gets right to work preserving, protecting, and defending the Constitution. And if I’m very lucky I could attend an inauguration as early as 2013.
3 replies on “Inauguration Day”
Full inauguration day 2009 watch on CNN web-site:
watch here
High speed and quality is checked!
I caught the speech, but I have pretty much tuned out everything else. In a way, the endless recycling of the same stuff diminishes the event. Pres. Obama’s rise is somewhat analogous to that of Pres. Kennedy. But Americans in 1960 were spared the 24×7 news-a-thon superfluous inauguration coverage Americans are being treated to today.
I remember the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986. I happened to be home with the flu that day. Every station cut away from regular programming for five to six hours of nearly uninterrupted coverage. Even when programming resumed, they cut into programs every half (or even quarter) hour with an ‘update.’ Throughout all of this wall-to-wall coverage, there was almost nothing to add. They showed the shuttle blowing up over and over again. It was both sickening and boring. That was my first dose of the kind of news cycle we have today. Lots of TV time; very little information; almost no value.
I was unable to catch the speech live, but I read is shortly afterwords. Later in the afternoon I heard news coverage with snippets of the speech. I noticed that when they were playing parts of the speech I enjoyed it (at least on the first repetition) but when they started pontificating on what was said I wanted to yawn. I soon turned the radio to a station that was still playing music.