Why does the media believe that it is important for me to know that the President enjoyed a golf game yesterday?
The media will usually use the President’s golf game as a lead-in to what it wants to say about current events. However, this does not sufficiently explain why the camera or the writer’s pen or the photographer’s lens naturally finds the president swinging a four foot pole at a two inch ball relevant and a good place to start.
Two concepts may help to explain this. The “reeling-in” and the “give the public a break” Ideas.
The former uses the golf game as backdrop because it does not expect the general public to pay attention to the intricate details of the story without first having a mental pacifier handed to them.
This “reeling in” leads the viewer by the hand to la la land where the under=lying message is coyly announced, for example, that the president is calm, cool, and collected, so “don’t worry when I tell you that he is on his way to prison for fraud, etc…”
This “give the public a break” technique is a sort of buffer between the story and what it really means, a public service to us from the media.
Combined, these two tricks of the trade lead to an intriguing story whereas there was previously only the possibility of a slightly different take on the never changing and endless stream of beaureaucratic red tape run amok that the journalist must call news or else lose his job
The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite 
So true. News quotas are almost as bad as police officer ticket quotas.