Many U.S. newspapers do a creditable job alerting the public to important events; after all, would we know about the "torture memo" at all had newspapers not investigated and broken the story? What most are complaining about, it seems to me, is television infotainment, especially the endless bloviation of cable "analysts" plus the vast shoutfest of talk radio.
Anyway, here's what Greenwald wrote:
"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"
Different people can, obviously, look at a list of events and assign different rankings to their order of importance. But even given cable's repeatedly-displayed prurient obsession with anything to which the words "sex" and "scandal" can be attached, rating a 90s sexual liaison as about a hundred times more important than the demise of the fourth amendment is a troubling choice. (You remember the fourth amendment, right? That's the one about the people being "secure" in their persons and homes against "unreasonable search and seizure.") And, by the way, what "domestic military operations" within the United States?
Of course, if people were "secure" against unreasonable searches and seizures of the electronic variety, maybe the whole Elliot Spitzer thing would never have seen the light of day, and all of the talking heads mentioned above would have been forced to sit in silence for what seems in retrospect to have been four solid days. Perhaps there is some logic here.
On the other hand, perhaps they can be enticed to discuss what I view as an extremely troubling development in the ongoing effort to preserve the tattered remnants of our Constitution if someone can convince them it's about sex (and possibly, military action within our borders).
But probably not.