Was the media even watching?

It was 8:04 PM Eastern Standard Time when Think Progress – a radical leftist blog – violated the White House's embargo and published a full text of the State of the Union address. It was even hours before that when key excerpts of the text were made public outright.

It is one of Washington's worst kept secrets that key speeches are given to the press with an embargo in advance of their delivery. Such is a strategic favor – loosening up media outlets for what is coming and allowing reporters ample time to assemble their work before deadline.

But sometimes the image of a forthcoming event shared in advance and the event itself are not wholly consistent. And Tuesday was no exception. The excepts of the State of the Union made public (not the embargoed copy of the full speech) prior to Mr. Bush's address were not exactly representative of what was forthcoming. Resultantly, the afternoon's headlines focused on America's “addiction to oil,” a theme reiterated in many Wednesday newspapers (including the top story in The New York Times).

Yet when Mr. Bush actually took to the House of Representatives yesterday evening, it wasn't until more than half way through his speech that a domestic agenda was even mentioned. The oil rhetoric may have been one of the day's surprises, but it certainly wasn't the rhetorical emphasis of an address centered around a comprehensive foreign policy more concerned with terror than crude.

But many members of the press apparently weren't paying attention. While some outlets, like the Washington Post, are electing to lead with the true emphasis of the speech – a continued and equally vigorous war on terror – too many seem to have tuned out after the pre-speech leaks and are running with oil as the major theme of the night.

From time to time, you will hear about an increasing divide between Americans and the press. I often cite this as proof of a political disconnect, and maintain that such is much of the problem. But I can't imagine the media's cause is helped when the public tunes in to watch the day's major news event, gathers its own intelligent observations based on the story itself – not the advance hype – and then wakes up to discover that the media has treated the same news item by making a mountain out of a mole hill and a mole hill out of a mountain.