Glancing at Memeorandum this morning, these two entries caught my eye:

International Herald Tribune:

U.S. says exercise by Israel seemed directed at Iran  —  WASHINGTON: Israel carried out a major military exercise earlier this month that American officials say appeared to be a rehearsal for a potential bombing attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.  —  Several American officials …

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Buck Naked Politics, Danger Room and Pat Dollard

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Discussion:

Damozel / Buck Naked Politics:   Is Israel Gearing Up for an Attack Against Iran?

Noah Shachtman / Danger Room:   Iran Attack ‘Rehearsal’ in Israeli War Game

Drillanwr / Pat Dollard:   Israel Is Drilling … Its Military … For Someone

ABCNEWS:

EXCLUSIVE: Hezbollah Poised to Strike?  —  Officials Say “Sleeper Cells” Activated in Canada  —  Intelligence agencies in the United States and Canada are warning of mounting signs that Hezbollah, backed by Iran, is poised to mount a terror attack against “Jewish targets” somewhere outside the Middle East.

Link Search: Ask, Technorati, Sphere, Google, and IceRocket

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Discussion: Hot Air, The Jawa Report and Counterterrorism Blog

And it underscored the importance of  this point made by Jennifer Rubin [e.a.]:

John McCain amidst the turmoil of Barack Obama’s public financing reversal is trying to make sure voters don’t forget Obama favors habeas corpus rights for Osama bin Laden. Today he put out a statement castigating his opponent for not coming clean on whether he favors executing bin Laden and what type of proceeding he would favor. …

I suspect if McCain is going to make any headway here he will have to make a major communications push, with speeches and ads, to explain why Obama’s position reveals him as unfit on national security. The media is already turning to other issues and is not inclined to spend the time to explain to the American people what parade of horribles will occur now that we have terror suspects flocking to federal courts.

The media is indeed turning to other issues, as is its wont. And we are being anesthetized—or, rather, are choosing to anesthetize ourselves—by a “news” diet that entertains us by constantly giving us new stories (rather than important news) to focus on for a while.

And if you’re Barack Obama, you take this as an opportunity to distract the media (and its easily distracted audience) with a makeover for your wife while you prattle on in an unclear and inconsistent way about national security…emphasizing punishment over crime prevention.

This didn’t get much play, did it?

Rudy Giuliani: Obama Wants USA to Be on Defense Against Terrorism

On a conference call this morning Rudy Giuliani continued his attacks on Barack Obama’s national security policy.

“I describe the difference as one being on offense and the other wanting to be on defense,” former New York City mayor and one-time GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani just said on a conference call with reporters.

It should get a lot of play, because it’s the fundamental issue of our time—how to provide national security while preserving our freedoms and our way of life (as a symbol and model for other nations to emulate).

Don’t be misled: Distractions can be useful for Mr. Obama, as they can for all politicians—including his hard-to-warm-up-to opponent.

NBC is reeling in the wake of Tim Russert’s death, and now Keith Olbermann (of MSNBC) is on the ropes—the subject of a backlash set off by his response to a rebuke from Katie Couric.

Plus, Olbermann has got the New Yorker on his case, too.

“I fired him,” Rupert Murdoch said recently. “He’s crazy.”

You really don’t need to know more than that. Others quoted in the piece attest to K.O.’s repulsive insanity, too, including even his producer:

But, just as Obama must work to win Clinton supporters for the fall campaign, Phil Griffin has to repair a fractured audience base, a portion of which saw sexism in his network’s Clinton coverage and vowed to boycott MSNBC. Griffin knows that some of that anger is aimed at his star anchor. “It was, like, you meet a guy and you fall in love with him, and he’s funny and he’s clever and he’s witty, and he’s all these great things,” Griffin said of the relationship between Olbermann and the Clinton supporters among his viewers. “And then you commit yourself to him, and he turns out to be a jerk and difficult and brutal. And that is how the Hillary viewers see him. It’s true.”

Then this asshole from MSNBC offers a revolting conclusion:

But I do think they’re going to come back. There’s nowhere else to go.”

If the NBC-MSNBC brass think that his female viewers will stick with the abusive Keith Olberman like battered wives who have “nowhere else to go,” I believe they are mistaken. He is loathsome—a rude boor, and a hack—and I’ve been saying it for a while.

Rounding out the sad state of affairs at NBC is this train wreck:

I mocked Matthews here.Another day, another media institution crumbles.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I’m wondering when TV “journalists” will face the truth about their profession—namely, that what you see below is not just the future of “the news” but also the present.

(via FishbowlDC)

Fishbowl quotes some of the “juicy bits” from the upcoming NYT Mag article:

 

“By the way, have you figured me out yet?” Matthews said at the end of another phone conversation the following day. “You gotta under-stand, it’s all complicated. It’s not like Tim.” Tim — as in Russert, the inquisitive jackhammer host of “Meet the Press” — is a particular obsession of Matthews’s. Matthews craves Russert’s approval like that of an older brother. He is often solicitous.

In an interview with Playboy a few years ago, he volunteered that he had made the list of the Top 50 journalists in D.C. in The Washingtonian magazine. “I’m like 36th, and Tim Russert is No. 1,” Matthews told Playboy. “I would argue for a higher position for myself.”

Friends say Matthews is wary of another up-and-comer, David Gregory, who last month was given a show at 6 o’clock, between airings of “Hardball.” It is a common view around NBC that Gregory is trying out as a possible replacement for Matthews.

According to people at NBC, Matthews has not been shy in voicing his resentment of Olbermann. Nor, according to network sources, has Olbermann bothered to hide his low regard for Matthews, although when I spoke to him, Olbermann denied any personal animosity toward Matthews and told me that he appreciates his “John Madden-like enthusiasm for politics.”

Hmmm. Recognize anyone?

Laurence Olivier as Archie Rice, in The Entertainer
London, 1957, photo by Snowden

p.s. The last time I used that image was here, in May 2007.

The last time I wrote about Matthews was here.

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*** When I claimed my blog on Technorati two years ago, this is how I described it:

They call it news. I call it infotainment.

No one can say that we weren’t warned well in advance. See, for example, Neal Postman and Michael Schudson and Joshua Gamson.

Just in time for the Episode Two of The Petraeus Show, which pre-game “reviewers” analyzed and critiqued well in advance of opening night (see the headlines on Memeorandum (at 9:30 a.m., just before showtime),
Gallup releases poll results on Americans’ attitudes toward the war in Iraq.

Upshot [e.a.]:

The 2008 presidential election will present voters with a clear choice on Iraq, with Republicans putting forth one of the Senate’s fiercest supporters of the war and Democrats choosing one of two leading Senate opponents, including Obama, who has made his opposition to the war from the beginning a major focus of his campaign. If McCain is elected, U.S. policy on Iraq will likely continue as it has under the Bush administration, with slower troop drawdowns tied to progress in establishing security in Iraq. If Obama or Clinton is elected, finding a quick end to the war will likely be the new president’s top priority.

In general, the public tends to side with the Democrats from the standpoint of favoring a timetable, but relatively few advocate a quick withdrawal. And most seem sympathetic to the Republican argument about the United States needing to establish a certain level of security before leaving Iraq.

Call me crazy, but it looks to me as if, all things considered, Americans would rather stick around and do the right thing by Iraqis than just get out.

It’s my opinion, based on an anthropological reading of the culture, that Americans would like to win in Iraq—as we like to win everywhere, because we Americans are a profoundly competitive people—but the conventional wisdom these days says otherwise.

See Glenn Greenwald, for example, in a post titled “Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people”:

Yesterday, Cokie Roberts — while expressing scorn for the “Responsible Plan for Withdrawal” advocated by 42 Democratic Congressional candidates and numerous military experts, and described by fellow panelist Katerina Vanden Heuvel of The Nation — said this:

VANDEN HEUVEL: It is not, but you know what, the responsible thing to do is withdraw. [you hear Cokie odiously chuckling at this point]

VANDEN HEUVEL: If we withdraw responsibly, the region would be more stable in the long term, America will be restored as a responsible global leader, and there are 42 challengers, you are absolutely right Cokie, who have a responsible plan to withdraw.

ROBERTS: Convincing the electorate of that I think would be very difficult, and I also agree that the notion that Sen. McCain and Sen. Graham you heard this morning putting forward, that Americans would prefer to win, is–

VANDEN HEUVEL: But what is winning? This war is unwinnable, there are no military solutions.

The video is also here. Roberts’ claim — that Americans agree with McCain, Graham and her that withdrawal is a bad idea and that they want to stay until we win — is just a lie. There’s no other way to put that.

Really? I don’t see any evidence to back up your claim, Mr. Greenwald. We may quibble about whether Americans want to “win” (since they’re repeatedly told by the MSM that we cannot win) or whether they just want to do the right thing, but the polling (for what it’s worth) suggests that relatively fewer people want to just get the hell out of there and call it “responsible.”

All things considered, people seem much more interested in the political theater surrounding The Petraeus Show. Here’s a gem from the NYT:

Testimony by General Will Test Candidates for President

All three senators running for president — John McCain of Arizona, Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois — will have a chance to question General Petraeus and Ryan C. Crocker, the American ambassador to Baghdad. Each of the three is determined to use the spectacle to advantage, but all face political risks as well as opportunities in the back-to-back hearings before the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. …

Mr. McCain, a Republican, has the logistical advantage in appearing before his two Democratic competitors. General Petraeus is set to testify first to the Armed Services Committee, beginning at 9:30 a.m., and Mr. McCain, the ranking Republican member, will be the second to speak, after the committee chairman, Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan.

Mrs. Clinton, a more junior member of the panel, will speak later. Mr. Obama, a junior member of the Foreign Relations Committee, which is holding its hearing in the afternoon, will be the 13th on that panel to speak, perhaps after the evening news.

The headline of this piece (referring to a “test”) is yet more evidence of Andrew Tyndall’s thesis about the nexus between the campaigns and the media and the gameshow-type coverage that has evolved during this election cycle.

As for the substance of the NYT’s Elizabeth Bumiller’s piece: she suggests that Obama’s testimony occuring “after the evening news” would be a bad thing.

What century is she living in? Her own paper today cites the woes of the networks’ news divisions. The “evening news” is a woolly mammoth.

Cable “news” is the thing, dontcha know? Who cares if Obama’s “test” occurs last on the floor of the Senate? It will happen just in time for Campbell Brown of CNN and Keith Olbermann to lead with it!

I’ll try to follow up tonight. Stay tuned.

Television is virtually a news-free zone—quick! how many TV programs can you name that tell you, with facts and figures and no spin or attitude, who, what, why, where, and when? huh? how many?—and yet supposedly sophisticated TV critics, like the NYT’s Alessandra Stanley, still refer to something called “cable news.”

The funniest thing about it, though, is that Stanley calls it “news” while describing it, essentially, as an unprecedented media and campaign clusterfuck [e.a.]:

The distinction of all three new hourlong programs is that the hosts are not the stars, the campaign is. Speeches, interviews, surrogate gaffes, opinion polls, delegate math and even party deliberations are showcased with the same swooshing sound effects and flashy graphics that tip viewers to an appearance by George Clooney on “Live With Regis and Kelly.”

It’s a marked change for cable news, which over the last few years has followed the lead of Fox News and promoted vividly opinionated hosts who shape the news flow to suit their own personas and pet peeves. It’s also refreshing …

I wouldn’t call it refreshing. I would call it over-the-top infotainment. But Stanley has got one thing right—it’s the campaigns that are the stars of these shows, and the folks running the campaigns understand the circus atmosphere that is today’s media world (much more so than does Alessandra Stanley. That’s why they’ve got their candidates doing the Ellen show, etc.

This kind of coverage is also, as Stanley points out, a ratings boon for the cable shows:

The public has not been this passionately absorbed in an election in decades, and the candidates are passionately intent on making their case on television. When they do, viewership goes up: it’s a boon for the 24-hour news channels, but even they are hard-pressed to keep up with the constant flow of debates, photo ops, tarmac tirades, so many words spoken and misspoken and so many talk-show appearances.

The candidates show up not just on “Meet the Press” or “60 Minutes,” but also on “Saturday Night Live” (Senator John McCain’s star turn dates back to 2002). More recently, Senator Barack Obama kissed and cuddled the ladies of “The View,” Mr. McCain traded insults with David Letterman on his “Late Show,” and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton joked about dodging sniper fire to arrive at “The Tonight Show” on time for Jay Leno. Mrs. Clinton is also scheduled to appear on “Ellen” on Monday, her first appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’s talk show since Mr. Obama’s last one. (In that appearance, Mr. Obama upped the ante by dancing for her — his second effort to, as he put it, “bust a move.”)

And the cycle is endless and self-sustaining: satirical shows like “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart” and “Saturday Night Live” take clips from the news and make fun of them; news programs take skits from “Saturday Night Live” and replay them.

Andrew Tyndall writes about this campaign—and the TV coverage—much more perceptively over at HuffPo. He says the Horse Race has given over to a Gameshow Reality contest:

Stop thinking of this election as a race to the wire to be won by the candidate with the finest pedigree, truest form and best connections. Start thinking of it as a cast of larger-than-life characters, scheming against each other while simultaneously trying to appear attractive to the electorate audience. Week by week the group undergoes media trials such as candidate debates and Sunday morning interviews. Each primary election constitutes another potential elimination round.

The winner gets to be a constant television presence in our homes for four years.

With open contests in both parties, this Presidential cycle offered the perfect opportunity to unveil this new method of coverage. The casting of the contestants could not have been better. In one tribe, as they say on Survivor, there was a handsome Mormon businessman, a colorful big city mayor, a slimmed-down Baptist minister and a crusty war hero. The other tribe had a self-made trial lawyer, a globetrotting Hispanic diplomat, a diligent feminist with that interesting celebrity marriage and an inspirational young African-American.

That’s infotainment! It rules!

Somehow I missed this a couple of months ago, but it’s still worth noting (in light of Roger L. Simon’s comment the other day).

You know things are really bad in MediaLand when Newsweek editor Jon Meacham has to try to convince j-school students that his magazine is better than The Economist, which they seem to prefer [e.a.]:

“And how to communicate that we have things to say that are both factually new and analytically new and to get you under the tent is a fact that scares me—not The Economist per se. It’s an incredible frustration that I’ve got some of the most decent, hard-working, honest, passionate, straight-shooting, non-ideological people who just want to tell the damn truth, and how to get this past this image that we’re just middlebrow, you know, a magazine that your grandparents get, or something, that’s the challenge. And I just don’t know how to do it, so if you’ve got any ideas, tell me.”

I haven’t picked up Newsweek in at least twenty years. I pick up The Economist occasionally, but I never have time to read it. If I did have (or take) the time to read a newsweekly, though, I would definitely choose The Economist, which covers everything in-depth, at leisure, in a thoughtful way, with background, and free of cant; and whose editorial staff indicates that it has an interest in understanding the whole world—often from the perspective of those living abroad, not from a distinctly American point of view.

I think American journalism’s biggest weakness is its obsessive solipsism. For a media elite that prides itself on its sophistication, the columnists and commentators whose opinions seem to matter (in both the MSM and the blogosphere) are maddeningly—and even frighteningly, considering the bad intentions of some of the bad actors out there—provincial and America-centric.

That’s my cosmopolitanism showing, though, and I don’t consider myself a laboratory. I certainly don’t represent any typical bloc of voters. Still, some of the comments at the New York Observer site reflect my point of view. Like this one:

Dear Jon Meacham, you just don’t get it. I (a well-educated consumer of print journalism) do not exactly look down on Newsweek. I’m a big fan of yours, too. Nobody doubts that it has good journalism, even though it is is a somewhat dumbed-down, glossly format. But the Economist offers something beyond coverage of the same three, U.S.-focused issues. The Economist is far from perfect; it has a lot of problems. But, the fact is, there is a whole lot more going on in the world than the U.S. presidential election, Iraq, and Afghanistan, important as these issues may be. A lot more. The Economist regularly reports on issues in every region. The U.S. news media, a decade or so ago, got hooked on the “big story.” That’s a great scale economy, but is really does not do the trick. So, you know, if you want to become more global in your coverage and aim straight for the cosmopolitan set, without dumbing it down, then you will get new readers. But, I suspect you will lose a lot, too. You’d have to lay out more money for less subscribers. I doubt you will do that…

Yep. I think the narrow focus and simplistic storylines don’t appeal to those (the educated) who are willing to take out the time to read a newsweekly. It’s also likely that the concept of a newsweekly  is hopelessly outdated. News comes in rivers! It’s everywhere! Who cares what happened last week, fer crissakes? If we’re interested in the “news,” we wanna know what’s happening now.

But another reader at the Observer offers a different kind of critique, specific to Newsweek’s reporting—its compact with its readers—, and backs it up with evidence [I have taken the liberty of adding a link to the AJR piece he quotes, which I've been meaning to write about for a very long time but never got around to; it is the clearest indication by far that newsrooms now consider themselves to be primarily in the storytelling (rather than fact-reporting) business [e.a.]:

Baby Boomer Professor (not verified) says:

Dear Mr. Meacham,

You can’t figure out why we have deserted Newsweek because the political correctness you stand for made it unwise for us to tell you the truth. I subscribed to Newsweek for years. I remember George Will’s column pooh-poohing the China Syndrome the week Three Mile Island happened. I waited gleefully for Will’s next column, which came out headlined, “As I was Saying…” Once leaving Newsweek was as unthinkable as leaving the Democratic Party. But then came your beloved Clintons, and you changed.

Here’s your public face, the obnoxious Evan Thomas, trying to put the best spin on heading the Duke lynch mob:

[On Newsweek's coverage of the Duke rape case]: “The narrative was properly about race, sex and class…. We went a beat too fast in assuming that a rape took place…. We just got the facts wrong. The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong.”
– American Journalism Review, August/September 2007 issue.[1]

Consider the mind-blowing implications of that “defense” of Newsweek’s abominable reporting—they got the story right; it was only the facts (which is to say: everything) they got wrong. Huh? You can see why some former devotees of American journalism are shaking their heads and wondering what’s happened to the news business (beyond the obvious disappearance of news reporting from TV).

Dave Marash beats around the bush a lot, but eventually he explains, more or less, why he left Al Jazeera English [e.a.]:

Just as Al Jazeera Arabic can rightfully claim to be a first-class news organization with high professional standards, but one that authentically represents the point of view and interests of the region defined by the Arabic language, less defined by but certainly involved in the Islamic faith, and most particularly the gulf region, I think that Al Jazeera English is a very competent, very professional news organization that does a particularly great job south of the equator, but tends to report almost everything from the point of view of either the Arabic-speaking world or at the very least what you might call the post-colonial world. And since I’m not authentically those things, I don’t belong there.

Huh?

Marash notes a shift in perspective, dating to the flexing of the Saudi Arabian muscle during the time of the Mecca Agreement (last year), when, Marash suggests, there was a shift in the balance of power in the region [e.a.]:

BC: What changed?

DM: I think that the world changed about nine, ten months ago. And I think the single event in that change was the visit to the gulf by Vice President Cheney, where he went to line up the allied ducks in a row behind the possibility of action against Iran. And instead of getting acquiescence, the United States got defiance, and instead ducks in a row the ducks basically went off on their own and the first sort of major breakthrough on that was the Mecca agreement, which defied the American foreign policy by letting Hamas into the tent of the governance of the Palestinian territories. This enraged the State Department and was one crystal clear sign that the Mideast region was now off campus, was off on its own. And it is around this time, and I think not coincidentally, that you see the state of Qatar and the royal family of Qatar starting to make up their feud with the Saudis, and you start to see on both Al Jazeera Arabic and English a very sort of first-personish, “my Haj” stories that were boosterish of the Haj and of Saudi Arabia. And you start to see stories of analysis in The New York Times where regional people are noting that Al Jazeera seems to be changing its editorial stance toward Saudi Arabia. I’m suggesting that around that time, a decision was made at the highest levels of [Al Jazeera] that simply following the American political leadership and the American political ideal of global, universalist values carried out in an absolutely pure, multipolar, First Amendment global conversation, was no longer the safest or smartest course, and that it was time, in fact, to get right with the region. And I think part of getting right with the region was slightly changing the editorial ambition of Al Jazeera English, and I think it has subsequently become a more narrowly focused, more univocal channel than was originally conceived.

Marash also explains what drew him to the concept in the first place:

[T]he thing that I loved best about the original concept was the sort of fugue of points of view and opinions, because I think that’s what desperately needed in the world. We need to know, for example, in America, how angry the rest of the world is at Americans. Our own news media tend to shelter us from this very unpleasant news. So if you watched and every piece seemed tendentious and pissed you off, and I don’t think that would be the case, but even if worst case the channel turned shrill and shallow, you would still want to watch them on the principle that millions—tens of millions—of people watch them every day and you need to know what’s going on in their brains.

Know thine enemy. Marash got closer than most.

Once upon a time in the late 1950s, there was a TV game show with that ungrammatical name, hosted by Johnny Carson.

These days, it’s a question we have to ask ourselves every time we open a newspaper. Howard Kurtz reports in the WaPo:

The Los Angeles Times has acknowledged that it unwittingly relied on fabricated FBI documents, created by a con man, for a report that implicated associates of rap mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs in the 1994 shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur.

The story’s author, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips, said in a statement late yesterday: “In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job. I’m sorry.” Deputy Managing Editor Marc Duvoisin also apologized, saying in a separate statement: “We should not have let ourselves be fooled. That we were is as much my fault as Chuck’s. I deeply regret that we let our readers down.”

The embarrassing admission came hours after a report by the Smoking Gun. The Web site, which specializes in law-enforcement records, said the Times “appears to have been hoaxed” by “an accomplished document forger” in its story last week tying Combs’s associates to the non-fatal shooting of Shakur 12 years ago.

Once more, online triumphs over print. Increasingly, the Web is a check on the MSM.

Across the Pond, a more traditional check on the media brought judgment to bear last week. In a first for the British media, the tabs apologized to one of their victims:

The headline, splashed across the top of the front page of The Daily Express on Wednesday, could not have been clearer or more jarring: “Kate and Gerry McCann: Sorry.”

The paper indeed had something to be sorry about. In the ensuing article, it admitted that much of its coverage of the case of Madeleine McCann, who disappeared shortly before her fourth birthday during a family vacation in Portugal last May, was completely wrong. Especially the part where it had repeatedly accused Madeleine’s parents, Kate and Gerry, of murdering her and then covering up their crime.

I don’t follow the British media to know what kind of effect this had, or is expected to have in the future. But at the very least it’s a kick in the pants for the outrageous British press … for now.

Meanwhile, we’re all left with the ungrammatical and nagging question: who do I trust?

Dennis Prager asks a provocative question: “Why Do Palestinians Get More Attention than Tibetans?

He lists a bunch of reasons: terror, oil, Israel, China, the left, and the UN. My favorite answer is last [e.a.]:

The seventh reason is television news, the primary source of news for much of mankind. Aside from its leftist tilt, television news reports only what it can video. And almost no country is televised as much as Israel, while video reports in Tibet are forbidden, as they are almost anywhere in China except where strictly monitored by the Chinese authorities. No video, no TV news. And no TV, no concern. So while grieving Palestinians and the accidental killings of Palestinians during morally necessary Israeli retaliations against terrorists are routinely televised, the slaughter of over a million Tibetans and the extinguishing of Tibetan Buddhism and culture are non-events as far as television news is concerned.

Setting aside Prager’s pro-Tibet sympathies and his Palestine fatigue, it’s worth paying attention to his last argument, which is as profound as it is simple. I repeat:

No video, no TV news.
No TV, no concern.

That is, I believe, an underexamined (so far) reason for the American public’s lack of interest in the wars in both Afghanistan and Iraq, of course: there is little to no video, except when some American luminary is visiting (and then the usual terrorist suspects in Iraq piggyback on the media coverage and put on a really violent show).

As if on cue, PEJ releases a report about how last week’s “news” was dominated by a pseudo-event (Obama’s race speech) rather than by events on the ground that have an impact on how Americans live their day-to-day lives (which, once upon a time, was the province of the “news”). ETP’s Rachel Sklar notes that the over-the-top Obama coverage totally eclipsed the five-year anniversary of our engagement in Iraq.

Well, the PEJ just released its fifth annual State of the News Media report, in which I read this notable bit [e.a.]:

Citizens suggested that the press failed to deliver sufficient coverage of some basic bread and butter issues, such as rising gas prices, toy recalls, and the legislative battle over children’s health insurance. … To the extent the press covered distant parts of the world, people in some ways thought even that was too much.

PEJ suggests that we Americans just aren’t that into anything that doesn’t touch our daily lives:

This suggests that the media, in not covering Iraq, is merely giving the audience what it wants. Apparently, the majority of people who watch TV don’t want to think about Iraq. That seems to be the consensus.

I’ve noted this before, of course: the “infotainment” in Infotainment Rules refers not so much to the fluffy content offered by the MSM as to the type of coverage that the MSM gives the “news”—that is, stories are chosen for their entertainment value and they are presented with entertainment values (conflict, dramatization, exaggeration of the importance of personality traits in the “characters” [public figures] who are featured in news stories [which makes them into caricatures but also into recognizable archetypes for a mass audience], an emphasis on emotion, etc., etc.].

Turning away from our apparent lack of interest in Iraq and to the general question of what we are interested in leads to questions about our jam-packed attention economy, in which a gazillion items from a bazillion entertainment and “news” outlets compete for just a fraction of our individual focus. As a society, we suffer from information overload and information pollution, and yet as individuals we also want to be informed about the things that might affect our daily life (the “news” is an early-warning system for possible dangers ahead).

Though we say we want “news,” we force the news media (which we depend on) to compete with everyone else who’s got something to sell. We are in control, through our attention span. They are all vying for a bit of our attention.

Those who want to get our attention have to give us a valuable intangible that cannot be reproduced at no cost, says Kevin Kelly. Among those intangibles is trust. There are a bunch of others. It’s fascinating stuff; read all about it here.

You know that almost 50 people died yesterday as a result of the horrifying tornadoes that ripped through several states, right?

Well, here’s how Good Morning America started the day:

Set to Aerosmith’s “Dream On,” Diane Sawyer who, after anchoring five hours last night, told viewers, “This morning, the dream lives on.” After a mention of the storms in the show open, GMA spent the next 12 minutes talking politics. First with George Stephanopoulos then with Kate Snow (with Clinton campaign), David Wright (with Obama campaign), and Ron Claiborne (with McCain campaign). Next, Robin Roberts interviewed Mike Huckabee. The last question to Huckabee was about the tornadoes that affected his state and others. Sawyer then brought in Sam Champion who reported live from Atkins, AR.

I think I have accumulated enough evidence in two years of writing this blog to show that any TV executive who claims to broadcast something recognizable as “the news” is a big, fat liar.

Can it be any plainer than at CNN, a network that, when it began, was devoted entirely to news.—Now, its honchos are delighted to be able to bring you the liveliest entertainment that they can squeeze out of a given event.

As the exchange grew angrier, Sam Feist, the political director for CNN, said, “This can be the rest of the debate — that’s O.K.” … During the thrust-and-parry between the candidates, CNN’s cameras pulled back to show both men.

“Sit on it,” said Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN, who was in the control booth for both debates. “That’s the story, right here, the two of them.”

This was the “two-shot,” which has become the defining image of the recent televised debates. …

“Television traditionally shows the person asking the question, then cuts to the person answering,” Mr. Bohrman said later. “I’m a firm believer in watching the person to whom the question is being asked. I want to see them think.”

The producers made extensive use of the two-shot throughout the Democratic debate, but they mainly captured the candidates nodding in agreement with each other. Speaking to the moderator, Wolf Blitzer, through an earpiece at the halfway point of the debate, Mr. Bohrman suggested taking a tougher stance with the candidates.

“You have to become part of this, Wolf,” Mr. Bohrman advised. “If this was ‘Late Edition,’ ” Mr. Blitzer’s Sunday interview show, “you’d be having more of a conversation.”

I have no objection to horse-race coverage of elections, which are horse races. But have TV executives given up entirely on delivering hard information to their audiences?

And why am I—a lowly, pseudonymous blogger who watches the media as a mere hobby—the only person who seems to care about the news-free zone that is TV? Especially since there are so many organizations that purport to study the media?