“Hello, my name is Joe Biden. I work for Barack Obama.”
Nairobi will remember this pithy 2010 introduction to a University of Nairobi audience at the KICC when America’s Number Two came to town. Well, that man from Delaware is now president. And America is back to boring.
After four tumultuous years of Donald Trump, when even official government briefings were never devoid of high drama, the news media in Washington DC is settling in for normal.
“Instead of a clown show, White House briefings will return to the hallowed American tradition of being completely boring and useless,” Politico wrote on January 23.
Within 24 hours of Biden’s swearing in last week, various US media offered similar reviews, that the new administration is orderly, normal.
“Biden’s inauguration offered what America needs: A ‘return to normalcy,’” read a Washington Post headline January 21.
A column in The Atlantic opened with this intro: “Joe Biden has a real shot at being a boring president. It will require constant work. Many forces of commerce and human nature are arrayed against him, and countless obstacles stand in his path. But if the country is lucky, entire days will pass without the president’s activities agitating the public mind.”
Again, a stark contrast with Trump’s four years of mayhem.
But a problem is looming. The news media can’t stand normal. Normal is boring. It’s only a matter of time before, as Politico put it, “the desire to appear combative and to blow things out of proportion to demonstrate toughness” returns.
Which begs the question: is media just a preternatural skeptic, even cynical animal, always on the hound for the abnormal, the unboring?
Could this be the reason Kenya’s media is stuck on wall-to-wall political coverage, why mainstream news houses here chase only high drama and bitter fights, real or imagined?