Freelance writer Christian Chensvold is sick of the use of the phrase "It's all about" in journalism:

But in a twist that is wholly unironic, our latest pet peeve concerns not linguistic misuse, but overuse: This season, in both broadcast and print media, apparently it's all about the phrase "it's all about."

Speaking of cliches, I'll use the lazy reporter's right-click man, Google statistics, as the almighty cultural barometer: At the present moment, a Google News advanced search reveals 7,010 uses of the exact phrase "it's all about" in the past 30 days.

An embarrassing number of them are in headlines, and even the most stalwart media institutions are culpable.

As if the feckless overuse of this cliché weren't bad enough, as if the indeterminate "it" (as in the phrase "it's raining") in "it's all about" didn't encourage sloppy communication, the phrase itself suggests a kind of reducto ad stupidum in which any phenomenon can be boiled down to one essential quality, like the "Think Pink" number in the movie "Funny Face."