No cute puppies in Asia

"[I]t's bad all around when American press coverage makes people feel that perfectly predictable results constitute a shameful failure for the country and its leadership."

James Fallows “marvel[s] at how badly the mainstream American press distorted the picture of what happened during Barack Obama’s just-ended tour of Asia.” (See here, here, and here.)

Or you could just read this NYT’s “news analysis” piece, which really gives the game away. While the article pretends to examine why “Asia was always going to be a tough nut for [Obama] to crack,” what it admits, right up front, is that Obama’s Asia trip was a media failure because:

(1) Michelle Obama didn’t go, so there were no ladies fashions to cover.

(2) Israel wasn’t involved, so there was nothing of interest to Christian Zionists.

(3) There were no side trips to Indonesia, so there were no soft and fuzzy stories to crank out about Obama’s boyhood days in the Pacific.