Jay Rosen offers up a tremendously interesting and thought-provoking essay about meaningless PR stunts and whether or not we should cover them. You might say, "Well, of course, we shouldn't cover meaningless PR stunts". But what if that stunt was the President of the United States visiting U.S. Troops in Iraq on Thanksgiving? Aaah. Now you've got an ethical quandary on your hands. This stunt exists only for the press and costs several million taxpayer dollars. But this is such a stunt --- I mean, it's a doozy -- that you can't resist. And yet, if, as some commentators have said, our job is tell the truth, what are we doing if we agree to not say anything about this stunt until after the stunt is over? From Rosen's blog:
Ask any of the reporters who accompanied Bush to Baghdad what they were doing there and, after allowing for the unusual circumstances (extreme secrecy) they would say they were there to "cover the president's surprise trip to Baghdad." Which sounds reasonable enough until you realize that the president's trip did not exist as a workable idea outside the anticipated news coverage of it. This realization takes under three seconds. The whole notion of the trip as an independently existing thing that could be "covered" is transparently false, as the White House warning to journalists demonstrates. If word leaked out, the trip was to be cancelled--it would no longer exist--and the airplane would turn around and head back to Washington. That does not mean the trip was illegitimate to undertake or to treat as news; but it does mean that its potential legitimacy as news event lies outside the logic of "things happen and we cover them" or "the president took decisive action and the press reported it.