Zunegate: Internet Agog as Obama Uses Microsoft Zune Instead of iPod   - 941 Views,

Welcome to Zunegate.

It all started when Philadelphia’s CityPaper.net reporter Neil Santos reported that Obama had dropped in to the gym where Neil usually works out. Just why Obama dropped into the Philly gym has never been explained, but in any event, the president-elect hopped on to the treadmill next to Neil, and Neil later blogged about it.

In what was an offhand, throwaway remark buried in the 4th paragraph, Santos happened to mention that Obama was listening to a Zune. In fact, his exact words were “But he hopped on the machine next to me and broke a mean sweat while reading a copy of USA Today and listening to his Zune.”

Now, if I happened to find myself working out next to the next president of the United States, and I blogged about it, I would think that I’d get all sorts of comments asking all sorts of questions from “What kind of shape is he in?” to “What section of USA Today was he reading?” to “What sort of shoes does he wear to work out?”

And I’d be wrong.

Because Santos got none of those questions. Instead, his post precipitated a howl of protest and disbelief that the president elect - a known Mac user - was listening to a Zune instead of an iPod.

Santos himself seems well aware of the irony. In fact, in the follow-up piece in which Santos coins the term “Zunegate”, as he is called upon to defend his identifying the MP3 player as a Zune (”I’ve seen a Zune in action. I know what it looks like.”), he himself says that if you want to be sure what Obama’s choice of MP3 player is:

“There’s only one way to find out for sure. Ask the man yourself the next time you see him at your neighborhood gym, if that’s really the first thing you’d want to ask our President-Elect.”

Is this really what is foremost on the minds of America’s electorate? Right now there are more than 1,400,000 results for the search term Obama zune.

There are only 281,000 for the search term Obama “health policy”.

What does that tell you?