Slog

It is kind of annoying to look at the Yahoo homepage and see in bold text

"Gunman sent material to NBC"

while in much smaller print we see

"Four large bombs kill 183 in Baghdad"

Priorities ...

True that, tsm. Echoes Eli's post yesterday.

What troop surge? Or, troop surge = car bomb surge.

Fight or don't fight.

It is natural to be focused on events closer to home. Obviously, a mass shooting in the USA is going to get more coverage than say, a mass shooting in Germany.

the gaze of narcissus.

these 4 bombs, under the noses of our "surge", are the nail in the coffin.

we've lost in iraq. we've lost at home. we are lost.

33 senseless dead is just another afternoon in Iraq. Imagine if this happened everyday. Would we be talking about staying the fucking course?

I agree, this is just a normal day in Iraq and no one puts a face to all the innocent victims of that war. It is an insult to ever day to people there that it is considered ok not to talk about them or look at them as if they are not part of someone's family and they are not hurting. Bush goes to the memorial of the Virginia shootings but is the direct cause of just as many killings in Iraq every day.

I guess the numbercrunchers at CNN and MSNBC and other national news sites have concluded that Americans are too bored with Iraq stories, but the rest of the world are not. These media conglomerates need the ad money, too, ya know!

Oddly enough, the only national U.S. paper that seems to relatively give a shit about Iraq more than the others is USA Today, the paper we all made fun of in the 80s and 90s as "DisneyNN"

Virginia Tech is still the top story today on Dagens Nyheter, the leading daily in Sweden (as it has been since Monday).

Right now (6 p.m.), the primary image on CNN.com U.S. is the barrel of a gun pointed straight at me, with Cho on the other side. Someone Slog this??

These photos are FUCKED UP. I don't know what to say, except I am more disappointed with the media than I thought was possible. This is not an issue of censorship either.

B,
Bush is not the DIRECT cause of death in Iraq unless the distinction between direct and indirect is to lose all meaning.

It's sort of a good news/bad news thing.

The good news is that news orgs like CNN and Newsweek are clearly capable of doing better and in fact, ARE doing better.

The bad news is that they've made a conscious decision NOT to do better in the United States because they wouldn't make as much money as a network that focuses solely on Anna Nicole Smith instead of Iraq.

The point is, Iraq happens everyday and most Americans have become numb to it. Virginia Tech is an anomaly and therefore news. I'm not saying it's right, it's just the way it is.

Before Virginia Tech all the news was about Imus, and before that it was Anna Nicole.