Margaret Wente wrote some stuff on global warming in her Globe and Mail column on good news for 2009 that I can only describe as breathtakingly ignorant.

Think you can make better news decisions than the tall foreheads running the Toronto Star?

Public editor Kathy English would like you to take a 10-question news judgment quiz that seems to be ripped right from the year's headlines.

The shovelware version has some comments attached.

Andrew Coyne, quite likely in response to Jeffrey Simpson's annual mea culpa in the Globe and Mail, used to write a witty year-ender in which he would highlight all the things he got right.

I checked at macleans.ca and didn't see such an effort for this past year yet, but he'll have a tough time explaining away this May 14 headline:

Why the public might buy into a carbon tax

Oopsie. :)

Via Twitter:

KathySierra RT @billbrandon: Sometimes the meme content in tweets is so lightweight and numerous, it's like being stoned to death with popcorn.

Margaret Wente and Jeffrey Simpson revisit their records over the past 12 months.

From the Globe and Mail:

Normally, the press stands apart from mass adulation. Not so with Mr. Obama. A recent report in The Washington Post read like a mash note from a teenager. The article had a picture of the Lightworker, shirtless, and commented: “… he was photographed looking like the paradigm of a new kind of presidential fitness, one geared less toward preventing heart attacks than winning swimsuit competitions.” I beg to differ. Pass the defibrillator, now.

The reporter/disciple was, however, just warming up. Next he galloped off into territory left unexplored even in chicklit: “The sun glinted off chiselled pectorals sculpted during four weightlifting sessions each week, and a body toned by regular treadmill runs and basketball games.”

If this guy gives up the politics beat, there are a hundred massage parlours out there thirsty for this kind of copy. This is The Washington Post, remember. Has the financial crisis tipped the collective media mind into entertainment reporting mode?

I'm hate making predictions, but I will venture that the level of Obama-mania in the United States media will subside in the next 12 months, if it doesn't turn into a full backlash.

Obama seems to be a remarkably skilled (even gifted) politician, but he's still a human being. After Jan. 20, he will have to start implementing decisions, and he will have to decide who to betray and what promises to break (hey, that's politics).

As soon as the media decides that the Lightworker is a fallible human politician after all, the hyperbole will start working against Obama, just as it is working for him now.

Addendum

So I just went back to the original W-P story published Dec. 24: As duties weigh Obama down, his faith in fitness only increases, by Eli Saslow.

It was essentially a soft feature about how important staying in shape is to Obama. Yes, the prose was a little purple off the top (that's the snippet Murphy chose), but overall, it's a pretty good yarn.

From Six Pixels of Separation:

We no longer have a twenty-four news cycle. Something happens in the world (Mumbai, Gaza, or that someone was involved in a plane crash) and somebody, somewhere is informing the world through text, images, audio and even video within sixty seconds. What does the news and media industry look like now? Media empires are going to look very different in the coming months and years as we quickly shift into this Sixty Second News Cycle. It's no longer about which outlet breaks the new or how fast, it's going to be about how well they can report on something that everybody has already seen. By the time it takes a news outlet to produce a TV news segment, record some audio for radio or draft up a newspaper article, that news item has not only moved on, but it has already been replaced - countless times - by more and more news. Publishing online is fast and free.

We are inches away from the real-time news cycle.

The flow of the news is only increasing. It is hyper-local and global at the same time. News from your backyard is at your fingertips at the exact same speed as news from across the globe. How advertising is bought, sold and displayed is going to have to adjust. The longer, more thought-out and verified stories are going to have to mingle with the 140 character blasts. It's not going to stop. It's only going to increase.

I left the following comment:

Tabatha Southey takes note of how real news this holiday season may pushed out the traditional service journalism that prevails at this time of year -- and the consequences that may have flowed from that.