Saturday mornings always suck when you’re a news junkie. You end up hearing a lot about nothing. This Saturday is even worse because that noth
August 18, 2006

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Saturday mornings always suck when you’re a news junkie. You end up hearing a lot about nothing. This Saturday is even worse because that nothingness has been transformed into a replay of this entire week of non-stop coverage of the JonBenet Ramsey murder case. Jon Stewart did a good job hitting on the attention deficit disorder that our media seems to suffer from.

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“Three year war in Iraq is less than thirty day old bombing of Lebanon which is less than explosive Gatorade on a plane which is all chickshit to break in the ten year old murder case.”

It is mind boggling. Take CNN. When the Israel/Lebanon conflict started, they moved almost every reporter they had to the region. I guess they figure once something like that starts, then rest of the world stops. Well it does stop for the mainstream media.

On Thursday, when a federal judge ruled the NSA wiretapping program was illegal, that was huge news to us on the blogosphere. The network media didn't feel the same. Think Progress put a table together of the time the big three networks (ABC, CBS, NBC) devoted to the story on their nightly news and compared it to the time they spent on the Ramsey case. NBC spent seven minutes and 39 seconds on Ramsey and only 27 seconds on the NSA ruling. ABC actually did the best; they spent four minutes and three seconds on Ramsey and two minutes on the NSA ruling.

You can't help but think that Bush was on his knees thanking God when news of John Mark Karr's arrest came out. He knew that the media would suffer the same condition he does when a shiny object hangs in front of him - distraction.

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