Gates, Crowley and the president at the much ballyhooed 'Beer Summit'
Long before Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Sgt. James Crowley arrived at the White House for beers with President Obama, the media had turned the get-together into a full-blown circus sideshow.
Obama intended for the gathering to ease tensions among the three men after weeks of racially-tinged controversy.
As anyone who follows the news likely knows by now, less than two weeks earlier Crowley, who’s white, had arrested Gates, who’s black, after Gates appeared to be breaking into what turned out to be his own home in Cambridge, Mass. (In fact the door was jammed, and he was trying to get it open.)
Asked about the matter at a news conference a few days later, Obama said the police had “acted stupidly.”
>> Watch video of his remarks here.
The president later expressed regret for his choice of words, but to no avail; the damage had been done. His remarks set off a national maelstrom – so much for the “post-racial America” his election was supposed to have symbolized.
Obama sought to quell things by bringing the parties together for beers in the Rose Garden Thursday night. (Vice President Joe Biden was also on hand, for some reason.)
The so-called beer summit sent the media into palpitations.
Cable news networks had countdown clocks for the gathering, as if they were waiting for polls to close on election night.
The New York Times even live-blogged the event, and dutifully reported what beers each attendee chose:
Mr. Obama had a Bud Lite, Sergeant Crowley had Blue Moon, Professor Gates drank Sam Adams Light and Mr. Biden, who does not drink, had a Buckler nonalcoholic beer. (Mr. Biden put a lime slice in his beer. Sergeant Crowley, for his part, kept with Blue Moon tradition and had a slice of orange in his drink.)
For all the ballyhooed build-up, though, the beer summit turned out to be quite lame – at least, judging from the voyeuristic view television cameras offered, from 40 feet away, of the meeting of this “Coalition of the Swilling,” as CBS News dubbed them.
There was no beer pong, or quarters, as some bloggers had hoped for, nor the sort of drunken hilarity that a New Yorker writer dreamed up. (How could there be with light beer?) And the president certainly didn’t whip out a Marlboro and light up.
Rather, what we ended up seeing on TV – for all of one minute – was the men sitting around a patio table, chatting over frosted mugs of beer. The only real action I could decipher was Biden and Obama shoveling handfuls of nuts into their mouths. Bo-ring.
So the beer summit was hardly a watershed moment in U.S. race relations. But then, Obama and the other men never sought to portray it as such (though there were rumblings of this being a “teachable moment,” a catchphrase I can’t stand).
Not surprisingly, it was the media, particularly the broadcast folks, who gleefully blew it way out of proportion. Meanwhile, the U.S. economy is teetering on the brink, Obama’s attempts at health care reform are faltering, and the country is embroiled in two intractable wars.
But the cable news networks don’t much care to focus on such substantive issues if they have an excuse not to.
Why focus on real news when you have these two?
After all, none of that stuff is as much fun to cover as the president quaffing beers in the Rose Garden (“Ale to the chief,” as one outlet put it), and certainly isn’t as intriguing as Michael Jackson’s sad demise, Sarah Palin’s latest idiotic utterances or Octomom’s new reality show.
To be fair, I’m not convinced the average viewer or reader cares a whole lot about those other weighty matters either.
And these days, when attracting eyeballs is the overarching imperative for struggling media organizations, it’s really all about what’s important to Joe Sixpack.
