Trivia or legitimate front-page news? Journalists and political commentators sparred over the difference Friday in a discussion of presidential coverage at Harvard's Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy.

One example of trivia trumping vital subjects, said Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Taylor Branch, is the "silly" New York Times Page One story about President Barack Obama's all-male basketball games.

But Boston Globe columnist Renee Loth and Elaine Kamarck, who served in the Clinton White House and was a senior policy advisor to Al Gore's 2000 presidential campaign, said the hoops story illuminated important gender equity issues.

Branch, a former magazine editor who compiled his latest book from interviews and conversations with President Bill Clinton, criticized what he called the press' "pattern of cynicism." He charged that the media has contributed to the "corrosion" of attitudes about politics as a profession. "Journalism has lost its balance about politics itself," he said, and this has gone "beyond skepticism." 

Loth made a similar contention. "In the 60s journalism was a craft, not a profession, and more identified with ordinary people. Now, we've lost some of our idealism," she said. "The media and politicians are going down together in terms of cynicism."

Veteran Washington Post political correspondent Dan Balz said the press now puts "even more emphasis on process than policy" with more discussion of smaller things. And "with a news continuum in place of the news cycle, nothing sticks. The public and the press have a much, much shorter attention span." He nonetheless sees a "tremendous amount of good journalism" such as coverage of the health care debate.

Daniel Okrent, The New York Times' first "public editor," attacked the "insane idea" of the scoop. "We have an atavistic attachment to being first," he said, worrying more about whether we're online at 3 p.m. or 3:05 than whether the story is right.

"In defense of trivia," Okrent mentioned what he called Times' "dull" front-page stories from decades past. "It was good journalism, but tedious."