Memo To Big News Orgs: It's Not News Every Time Bloomberg Tells Us How Wonderful He Is
January 4, 2008 -- 4:24 PM EST // //
Look, this is getting ridiculous. Mike Bloomberg -- who is attending a summit this coming weekend with retired politicians on how to save our nation from the horrors of partisanship -- has told us again and again in recent days how low his opinion is of the current Presidential candidates.
Bloomberg -- who has repeatedly denied that he's running for president -- is obviously saying this type of thing at least partly because he wants people to keep talking about him as a potential Presidential candidate. This is not a hard thing to figure out.
And so, at a certain point it should stop being news every time Bloomberg does this. Right?
But the big news orgs keep lavishing coverage on Bloomberg each time he says this stuff. Bloomberg panned all the presidential candidates on Wednesday, saying that they are all offering meaningless bromides to the nation's solutions. Bloomberg wasn't really specific about who or what policy proposals he was criticizing, but this earned him big articles from many news orgs anyway.
Today, Bloomberg again criticized the solutions being offered by the major presidential candidates. He again wasn't particularly specific. But yet again this earned him more coverage from The Times, and Bloomberg's upcoming summit to bipartisanship will get yet more media attention.
Look, at a certain point, we should start asking ourselves whether this stunt deserves any more attention. Many of the major candidates are offering detailed solutions to the country's problems. When Bloomberg falsely says none of them are, he's just playing a different rendition of the same tired old tune that has it that only a "nonpartisan" leader can solve our problems. The idea is that there's no way any of the ideas harbored by these candidates can be any good, since they all belong to the major political parties, which we already know are the cause of all our problems because David Broder and Mike Bloomberg told us so.
Really, until Bloomberg declares that he's running for president, and until his criticism has genuine specificity, what he has to say about the presidential hopefuls just isn't news anymore. Stop covering it already.
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