When I walked into the ING coffee shop this morning and looked up to see the CNN “news reports” about the flap over President Obama’s comments regarding Professor Gates’s arrest by the Cambridge police, I was reminded once again how much the quality of journalism has  generally declined during the last decade -- and how it has filled the American public’s brain with half-baked sound bites and quarter-truths.   What makes Made-For-TV journalism so dangerous is that there are a lot of people out there who will act and react on the bits and pieces of information they receive or headlines they read, because they don't have the time or patience or predisposition to seek the truth.   Had I gotten all my news from the sound bites and interviews played on CNN, I would have thought the President Obama had jumped into the fray with an uncharacteristic rush to judgment about the merits of the case by saying the Cambridge Police “acted stupidly.”     But there’s way much more to the story -- the news crawl  does not say,  for example:

• that President Obama’s comments were made in response to a pointed question from a reporter;
• that President Obama stated that he didn’t know “what role race played”
•         that President Obama put this in terms of Everyman: “(a)ny of us would be pretty angry,” 

• that when President Obama said something about the Cambridge Police “acting stupidly,”  it was in the context of this notion about being arrested in your own home  after there was proof it was yours:

"But I think it's fair to say, No. 1, any of us would have been angry. And No 2, the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was proof they were already in their own home.

•          Finally, when he did talk about race, he decoupled it from this incident:

“And No. 3,what I think what we know separate and apart of this incident, there is a long history of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That is a sign of how race remains a factor in society."

Yes, as President Obama acknowledged today, he might have used nicer words.   But due to the public and the media's co-dependency on short, speedy, and controversial news, the blogosphere is lighting up with accusations and recriminations about President Obama’s alleged rush to judgment--rushing to judgment themselves to sate their "news" hungry audiences, forsaking the larger issues of the day and the millenium.     What if we shut off the news crawls and reserve them for something like baseball scores and lottery ticket numbers?  What if news was the stuff of careful reporting and fact-checking?  What if headlines actually reflected the content of the story, rather than maximization of profits based on curb appeal?   What if we turned off the 24-hours news cycle?  The American public owes much to the Fourth Estate, but we should get far more than re-engineered sound bites, exploitation, character assassinations and result-oriented interviews in return.