Why we are where we're at

In a major journalistic coup, the Boston Globe reported on Thursday that

Barack Obama is no longer a scofflaw, at least in Cambridge and Somerville.

Two weeks before the US senator from Illinois launched his presidential campaign, he paid parking tickets he received while attending Harvard Law School, officials said yesterday.

Apparently, he had some 15 outstanding tickets dating back to the period 1988-1990. It came to light because

[i]n January, about when the Globe began asking local officials about Obama's time at Harvard, including any violations of local laws, someone representing the senator called the parking office to inquire about the decades-old tickets.

It turns out that he owed, and paid, some $375 in fines and fees. Far from being upset, one city official said it was "fabulous he finally paid them" and called his record of unpaid tickets "actually pretty run of the mill." That's something anyone who is experienced with the area, where residents often regard the cost of parking tickets as a routine budget expense, could confirm.

So a nothing, pointless story, right? Not exactly. However, it's importance lay not in anything it revealed about Obama but in what it accidentally revealed about the present-day news business: By its own admission, even before Obama formally announced his candidacy the Boston Globe was actively looking for some "violation of local law" he may have committed nearly 20 years earlier. Note well: This is not a matter of pursuing something brought to their attention, as piddly at it would have been even in that case. No, this was, again, an active search for something embarrassing, something sneaky, in his background; an active search, that is, for some dirty laundry.

It's thus a prime example of the kind of cheap, uninformative, issue-suppressing, personality-pushing, gotcha journalism that has turned the political and social issues of a nation into just another giggling game of "I gotta scoop" being played by the entertainment editor wannabes populating what passes for far too many newsrooms. Which makes it also a prime example of a good part of the reason why we are where we're at.

It is not a good place.