State of the Union Coverage

This week in Citizens and Media we were assigned to blog about our experience with the State of the Union address; but two thirds of us were not allowed to watch it.

I was among the third who had to restrict my information about the State of the Union to three blog sites: Talking Points Memo, Daily Kos, and Michelle Malkin.

I read Talking Points Memo's post first. Their coverage was straight forward, and extremely newsy (which is the norm for this site as far as I've experienced). Their first post about the SOTU was more of a summary than an analysis. It provided some key points and quotes (which were often mentioned in the other two blogs, but either praised or criticized). The text of the address and a video of the full speech were available as well.

One thing that I did find a bit sensationalist on TPM, was the coverage of Alito's reaction to Obama's criticism of the Supreme Court. At first there was just a straight piece with a video clip, and then opinion pieces, like this editor's blog, were posted. I really liked that particular post, because it did what I think many blogs strive to do-- look at the viewpoints found in traditional newsources and provide additional commentary. However, I did feel like TPM was trying to generate more hype about the incident than it deserved.

The next blog that I went to was Michelle Malkin. I checked these sites a few hours after the SOTU address, and at that point the only thing posted on her website was her live blog of her quippy commentary. It was nearly impossible for me to take her seriously. It didn't start out all that bad, except for her comment about "Obama's Swagga Recovery Speech," which was entirely distasteful. There was some genuine analysis at the beginning in the first post. However, that's where it stopped.

Malkin began mocking the President's speech, and it became more like "look at how funny I can be" than "let me dig into what he's actually saying." The only time (other than the first post) that she really made a worthwhile comment was when she pointed out that Obama was portraying himself as an outsider to Washington, when, let's face it, he isn't. But these very few insights were overshadowed by Malkin's disrespectful tone and "look at me!" approach to the speech. I did not feel any more informed after reading her feed.

The following morning there were a few more analysis posts by Malkin, and she provided a link to the full text of the speech. While this made her site a little more credible, there was still an extremely bitter taste in my mouth from the night before.

Daily Kos perhaps had the most coverage, although for me it was also the most difficult to wade through. As a reader I appreciated the variety of articles, opinions, live feeds and individual responses to the speech, and got a better sense of what wasn't said. The variety of opinion and the number of contributors made the site seem more like an open forum, which I liked-- there wasn't just one writer ranting the whole time.

In reading these three blogs I felt incredibly informed about the speech, and when we had a class discussion about our experiences, found that perhaps the group of us that had strictly read the blogs was the most informed. However, it was impossibly difficult for me not to watch the speech live. I would have rather had the opinion to watch the speech, form my own opinion, and then gone to the blogs and read their live feeds and response posts. While the blogs did give me a broad based idea of what was and was not said, I felt like I was missing something-- maybe I just needed to hear the applause in between each sentence.