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Beer Summit passed off as news

4 min read

If you’ve ever needed a “teachable moment” on why 24-hour cable news is somewhere around 20 hours or so more than we need, I give you the “Beer Summit.” Sure, there were discussions of the details, implications and significance of the meeting over beers at the White House between President Obama, Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the Cambridge cop who arrested him, Sgt. James Crowley. And yes, there was the question of the political impact and debate over how the issue of race remains despite the election of our first non-white resident of the Oval Office in history. But at some point or another, the national media (and this is one of the few times I’m comfortable lumping them all together, since I saw instances of this everywhere) turned their attention to the suds, as in, what kind of beer each man would drink during the meeting.

During the informal sit down over beers designed to lessen the growing tension over the incident, which the President described as a “teachable moment” on race relations, we’re worried about what kind of beer will be imbibed.

Really.

As of this writing, it was reported widely that the President will go with a Bud Light (or a Bud), Crowley will have a Blue Moon and Gates will have a Red Stripe (or possibly a Beck’s). This was considered news and reported as such. (And reported with a straight face, I might add.)

Had it been mentioned and we moved on, I would’ve been fine. But no, the choice of beverage was not considered an interesting detail or tidbit to the story. It became the story.

Each man’s pick was parsed for meaning; the decision to not go with an “American beer” was bemoaned and even the difference between a witbier and a pilsner was discussed. It was debated whether the leader of the free world picked his beer to appeal to the everyman. The political meanings of Red Stripe and Blue Moon were translated for us lay people.

Across the dial (not that anyone has a dial anymore, but “across the channel guide” doesn’t have a nice ring to it), Fox News, MSNBC, CNN weighed in on the significance of Bud Light, Blue Moon and Red Stripe. Even normally august NPR, the bastion of journalistic sanity, devoted time – twice! – to the men’s beer choices. My favorite program, “All Things Considered,” found it necessary to bring Jim Koch, founder of the brewery that makes Sam Adams beer, on to discuss the beer choices and let him share his painfully long metaphor on the similarities between the melding of beer ingredients and race relations. (They both have something to do with “lagering” apparently.)

All of which left me asking why? (Oh, why? Oh, why?)

Why do we care, at all, what kind of beer Gates, Crowley and Obama will sip at the picnic table outside the Oval Office while discussing this racial imbroglio? Why do we care if Obama has a Bud Light or Bud and whether Gates goes with Red Stripe and Crowley picks a Blue Moon? Why do we care?

To be honest, I don’t think we do.

I don’t even think the talking heads on television analyzing the beer choices care about the beer choices. Instead, I think talking heads need something to talk about, and there’s not 24 hours worth of news in any given day.

Sure, there are exceptions when there’s enough breaking news to warrant constant news, but the “Beer Summit” is evidence of how far we’ll blur the line of what constitutes news when there is too much day to fill and not enough to talk about. (Or, I should say, not enough to talk about that the news channels want to talk about.)

So we get beer choices as “news” instead of something actually newsworthy, like two ongoing wars, a domestic economy stumbling along, a major push for healthcare reform in the works, overall global financial instability or, heck, even NFL training camps about to open. You would think any of these things would be better to talk about than what kind of beer Obama is going to drink.

But I guess not.

However, while we’re worried about beer choices, I prefer a good hefeweizen. Let the parsing of my choice begin…

If you’d like to invite him to the White House for beer, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached by e-mail at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.

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