From WNYC in New York, this is on the media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield. This week we'll start by fixating on the very thing we hate others to fixate on.

Phony controversies manufactured by presidential campaigns to win the news cycle by distracting the media and the public.

If you've seen the talking dogs in the animated movie up, you'll be familiar with the phenomenon.

My name is Doug. I have just met you, and I love you. My master made me this collar so that I may talk.

Squirrel!

Last week, as so often happens, the media played the part of the dog.

Here was CNN's Wolf Blitzer being used in an Obama campaign video, quoting Mitt Romney,

sounding soft on Osama bin Laden.

It's not worth moving heaven and earth, spending billions of dollars,

just trying to catch one person.

He was referring to the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Now, of course, Romney's 2007 criticism

of President Obama's hunt for bin Laden

was far more nuanced than this video,

or Blitzer's original report, would suggest.

But as John Cassidy of the New Yorker wrote recently,

neither Mitt Romney's actual position nor his relative decisiveness as a leader

were really the point of this brouhaha.

In this case, the point was to draw the attention of the easily distracted dog away from the recent

less than stellar economic indicators, and blatant mischaracterization was merely the method.

This is all a very cynical game. In this instance, surely they had this ad on tap for a while,

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