The Media

What They're Talking About

Greenwald looks at the topics the very serious traditional media are ignoring. This is fascinating.

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.

Staggering and, sadly, not surprising.

At the same time, the least viewed blog entries I've written lately for the Huffington Post tend to be anything about Iraq and anything about torture. My most viewed blog entries recently tend to be the ones about the election and especially anything that rips Senator Clinton. This could just be that Huffington readers don't expect me to write about torture or Iraq. I don't know nor do I care, really. Just something I've observed and I'm just an angry liberal blogger without demographic research or focus groups (MRRR! Bad!).