The MSM Brings Its A-Game

The Anchoress:

On to Hugo Chavez! Realizing his comedy act doesn’t play well outside of the unhallowed halls of the useless, money-sucking United Nations, he is cancelling further mad expositions and going home. There was a very big story here, but the press appears to be downplaying it or, as a pal wrote to me today:

“This is interesting for the print media…The NY TIMES, Wash Post, LA TIMES and NY Post do not have Chavez featured on the front page - at least not online. USA TODAY has it buried at the bottom of the page; its lead ‘WORLD’ story online is about the pope. Only the NY DAILY NEWS has Chavez displayed prominently on the front. Yahoo this morning doesn’t include him in its news summary.

This clown comes to the United Nations, calls the American President a “devil,” (not that the religion-hating folks minded that - the irony!) and the other clowns in the room (whom we fund much-too-much) laugh and applaud, and it’s not a leading story the next day? Well. I guess we can quickly figure out that the “mediating intelligences” who determine what we will and will not see have decided that - for some reason - we’re better off not seeing the behavior of a pack of mad jackals…we might not want to continue funding them, or rushing to their aid when disaster strikes, you know? Or maybe, they figure the American public would look at yesterday’s very telling absurdities and say, “you don’t come to America and say that about her president…” Oh, no, what a freakin’ nightmare! It might even reflect well on Bush in the all-important, holy writ polls!

So, the press is trying to go as quiet as possible on Hugo and the UN gigglers and Ahmadinejad - so beloved of Mike Wallace - didn’t come off too well, either. I said yesterday that a “smart” press “would bury” the Chavez and Ahmadinejad stories…but I never said they “should.” Scrappleface understands.

Even worse, even the “increasingly unpopular war in Iraq” seems to be becoming “increasingly popular”. What a bummer of a week for the press! And by extension for their political party.

Yeah, that’s probably why the press has gone missing on a rather big story. They seem distracted, those “mediating intelligences,” and perhaps that’s why they missed the 35,000 people protesting Ahmadinejad’s visit to the UN, a protest which included speakers such as John Bolton, Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel, New York Gov. George Pataki and Alan Dershowitz. That’s a pretty luminous bunch of speakers and a lot of people, but the intelligent ones mediated that we did not need to know about it. Meryl Yourish points out that the only paper to mention this large protest was the NY Sun.

The ummm…approximately 2,000, who showed up to protest President Bush and the Increasingly Popular Iraq War, though, they got plenty of headlines. Note that all of those headlines read “thousands,”of protesters, not “only 2,000.”

As I’ve said before, headlines have a powerful effect on the world. Busy or incurious people rarely read past them. For some, the headline tells them all they will ever know about a thing. And the press knows it.