Glenn Greenwald, writing a week or two ago:
In the past two weeks, the following events transpired. A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking. It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to “domestic military operations” within the U.S. The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits. Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.
Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:
“Yoo and torture” – 102
“Mukasey and 9/11” — 73
“Yoo and Fourth Amendment” — 16
“Obama and bowling” — 1,043
“Obama and Wright” — More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
“Obama and patriotism” – 1,607
“Clinton and Lewinsky” — 1,079
And as Eric Boehlert documents, even Iraq — that little five-year U.S. occupation with no end in sight — has been virtually written out of the media narrative in favor of mindless, stupid, vapid chatter of the type referenced above.
Shit, Amp, it’s like this every day. People are doing heroic things in Iraq, our energy “policy” is in shambles, the legislative process deals with the country’s problems by lurching back and forth among pressure groups and moneyed interests instead of representing the people and defending the Constitution, and our media keep us updated on Britney Spears’ medication.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. The media are in the business of selling us what we want to buy. The British had an inquest into who was responsible for Princess Diana’s death. They decided to blame it on the paparazzi, etc. Sorry, they’re one step off. If you want to go past the immediate cause of a drunken driver, then the people who killed Princess Diana are anyone and everyone who bought a newspaper or magazine because it had her picture on it. The people responsible for the complete lack of focus by the media on important issues are people who make their political decisions based on the gender or race or attractiveness or glibness of the candidates instead of on what they say and do about substantive issues. And whose eyes would glaze over and whose thumbs would stab reflexively at the TV remote if someone came on the TV and started talking about the bills that Senator Clinton or Obama or McClain voted for or wrote and what they had to say in debate about them.
Iraq’s been written out of the media narrative because the facts there don’t fit the narrative they wish to present. They HAD to talk about Gen. Petraeus’s testimony, that was too big a deal to avoid. But otherwise, good news for America and Iraq is bad news for the narrative, so they’ve stopped talking about it.
In fairness, they’re just following “if it bleeds, it leads”. That’s not necessarily just an attempt to influence the political process in a particular fashion; it’s also a proven marketing strategy, and they need to sell air time and advertising pages to stay in business.