20060216
    The American news headlines have been filled this week with the non-controversy that was the Vice President’s hunting accident. If the accident had involved anyone other than the Vice President, it might have been a news footnote or even treated as a comedic event.
    Nevertheless, the media has obsessed for a week now over a subject that does not matter to anyone as anything else other than a curiosity. In fact, as things stand, the media has expended far more effort on the hunting story than it has on anything useful in recent memory.
    Consider, that while the media was demanding of White House Press Secretary John McClellan a second by second account of how the President found out about Cheney’s accident, Iran officially resumed its nuclear enrichment program, religious riots continued throughout most of the Muslim world, and domestically we still do not have a plan to fix the looming Medicare or Social Security problems that the nation faces.
    If the media would invest even half the effort into pursuing one of the aforementioned topics that it has into Cheney’s hunting accident, then the nation would be much farther along in resolving those problems. What the media has forgotten is that it acts, for better or for worse, as the mechanism by which the nation pays attention to what is going on around and in it. If the media trumpets Medicare reform, that’s what people think is important. If the media hounds a simple accident, the people change the channel to CSI.
    The problem is that, while the media is hounding a simple accident, other nations and groups are planning to do us harm, pleased by the fact that most Americans are too distracted by the nonsensical nature of the American news media to notice, and domestic threats build up to the point where it is almost too late to do anything about them.
    Unfortunately, it would take more than a few people caring to make some sort of change in the modern phenomenon that is the media. In fact, large groups of Americans would have to do the only thing that the media will listen to- that is shut it off- in order to get anyone’s attention. How does one effect that kind of change while so many are caught in the media’s thrall?
DLH
This is such a non event that it would seem to me that the White House would hold one press conference to discuss the accident, then at any other conferences refuse to discuss the matter and if the reporters insist, just walk out. Press conference over, period. Reporters are going to write what they want to anyway so they might as well get their knickers in a twist over being dismissed for not playing nice.