With Reporters Like This, Why Do We Need Tabloids?

If you’re looking for a reason the MSM is swirling down the tubes this story is a pretty good one.

The downfall of talk show host Don Imus for racist and misogynistic comments was the second most-heavily covered story of the year to date, according to the PEJ’s weekly study of the agenda of the American news media.

From his attempted redemption on the Rev. Al Sharpton’s radio show to the fallout over his firing by NBC and CBS, the controversy over Imus’s insults about the Rutgers’s women’s basketball team filled more than a quarter of the newshole (26%) of PEJ’s News Coverage Index for the week of April 8 to 13.

That’s pretty sad.

The only story that garnered a bigger slice of the news pie in any week thus far was the “debate” over the President’s surge plans for Iraq.

Think about that. We’re fighting a world-wide war. Our economy is roaring like a house afire. Iran is building nuclear weapons and has specifically threatened to use them against us and Israel. The Muslim Government in Darfur is still committing genocide. The Democratic leadership dangled billions of dollars in front of Congress in order to vote to hamstring soldiers in the field. The Democratic leadership has decided, somewhere along the line, to forget its promised Big Agenda items (anyone heard much about the minimum wage lately?).

These are all big stories. Most of them bear on each one of us directly. Most of them will bear on us well into this year, if not for many years. Many of these stories have millions of lives hanging on them.

None of them made much of a splash at all. Only a small part of the story of the war – no, a story about the argument about the war – seemed to matter to the MSM more.

In the meantime, the story that did grab all the attention was that of one washed-up disk jockey making a caustic statement about a bunch of women you probably had never heard of before last week. Don Imus is what the MSM thought it needed to talk about a whole quarter of the time it was talking.

That’s not just sad. It’s incompetent and terribly negligent.

RELATED: Bill Keller thinks that the Pulitzer Prize awards are overrated, even as he laments about his newspaper not winning more of them.

Boo hoo hoo.

(Via John Podhoretz, both times.)

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Category: Oh, THAT liberal media.