If there’s one thing that annoys me about my cohorts in the national press, it’s their fondness for reading significance into irrelevant details.
I’m talking about the kind of article that points to what people eat, or wear, or the songs on their iPod as revealing the hidden truth about their character. That can be the case–if they like to listen to “white power” songs when they drive, or an audiobook of The Iliad in the original Greek–but in most cases, it’s just silly.
Case in point: Anne Kornblut’s Aug. 17 Washington Post article on Giuliani and Senator Clinton making campaign stops in the Midwest and trying to “convince voters that they are normal people, rather than visiting members of the coastal elite.” Kornblut’s example of how they fake normality? Clinton ordered ice cream from a food stand.
Unless Clinton has a documented hatred for ice cream, it’s hard to imagine that her eating some while outdoors in the middle of summer actually requires an ulterior motive.
As former AP editor Jules Loh once said, what people eat for lunch doesn’t tell you anything about their character unless it’s on the order of filet of rattlesnake.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 10:41 am and is filed under Politics, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.