CNN reports that Georgia’s parliament approved a request by President Mikhail Saakashvili’s to declare a “state of war” with Russia. This is not the same thing as declaring war itself, apparently, nor does it impose martial law. However,
It gives Saakashvili powers he would not ordinarily have, such as issuing curfews, restricting the movement of people, or limiting commercial activities, those officials said.
Whatever. This is a serious matter, and you know the cable news channels will be covering …
John Edwards. Cernig writes,
Unbe-fricking-leivable! I am now officially disgusted with America’s insular and navel-gazing punditry. En masse and on a bipartisan basis the media, commentators and bloggers have decided that the Edwards Affair story is more important than events in South Ossetia. What happened, folks, did your minds cloud over at contemplation of events beyond these hallowed shores?
See also “Why TV news in the US is utter rubbish.”
The comments on the other site are spot on! For quite some time, I have noticed that it does not matter which “news” program I watch while flipping through the channels, they all have the same news “stories” with damn near the same dialogue in almost the same order. It is as if they all purchase their material from one source. Who is selling this stuff to our main stream media? It is inconceivable to me how so much can be going on in the world, and our major news sources (i.e., TV channels) can only give us the dumbest, most unimportant crap they have.
Agreed, that very young-looking McCarthy fellow over at the Guardian really has the American MSM’s number. Excellent, but stomach-churning, analysis.
Hi Maha,
It occurs to me that one of the reasons the events in South Ossetia are not big news on US teevee is because it doesn’t fit certain comfortable predigested narratives: It isn’t, for example, presented as a story of the plucky South Ossetians trying to free themselves from Georgia(like say, Kosovo declaring independence) because the media know that our government wants Georgia to become part of NATO.
Likewise, it isn’t a story of how Russia is bullying her smaller neighbor Georgia partly because Georgia has been pretty brutal in supressing S.O. If the media had an obvious good guy/bad guy narrative– or one that could be molded as such without too much obvious distortion– maybe we’d hear more about it.
And the Pakistan story of impeachment of their President. Or possible impeachment.
Nothing on the news about it. I guess the olympice in China are more important.