Why Bush Loves Britney
...and O.J., and restroom stings, and iPhones, and dog-fighting, and missing white girls...

September 21 2007
Counterbias.com
STEVE HOROWITZ
 

It was news of national import: Some men may have committed armed robbery in Las Vegas.

Stop the presses, everyone! Somebody call Walter Cronkite out of retirement! O.J.'s back!

That stiff breeze you felt was the huge sigh of relief from news channel executives. (That missing British kid in Portugal story was losing its zazz.) While the Katrina-force winds emanating from White House staffers signaled their relief that, with the citizenry contemplating the possible theft of sports memorabilia, Bush can continue spending $2 billion a week to kill American service members.

Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. It's not like the media never tackle the really important issues. In fact, I have the transcripts of a typical news channel political discussion right here:

HOST: Is the troop surge working?

PARTISAN PUNDIT OR POLITICO 1: Yes.

PARTISAN PUNDIT OR POLITICO 2: No.

HOST: All right, we'll have to leave it there. Up next -- has Britney Spears gained too much weight to wear a sequined bikini?

Thanks, America's most trusted news source!

Twenty-four hours is a lot of time to fill, but it gets easier when a few flips of the Rolodex lands enough professional opiners to last the day. Everybody wins. The opiners get the honor of having someone on TV talk to them. And the news shows get all the content they need with no legwork, no digging (except in the Rolodex.) There's no tedious record search, no midnight parking-garage rendezvous, no intricate piecing together of the puzzle. There are no puzzles. (Well, there are, but we no longer care if they're solved.) There's only the press conference to attend, the public statement to repeat, the police report to quote, the mug shot to publish, the embarrassing video to air, and the easy question to ask:

Did someone put out a contract on K-Fed?

Were Kathy Griffin's remarks at the Emmys offensive?

Was Hillary Clinton not deferential enough to General Petraeus?

All yes-or-no, let-me-tell-you-what-I-think speculation. No one asks the tough questions, like what gave us the right to cause the displacement of four-million-plus Iraqis, because tough questions can't be answered in the breaks between Levitra spots. But it's how the media stay in business. It's how we like it, or it wouldn't be that way. And it's how the Bush administration, with O.J. running interference like the good blocking back he never was, gets away with its end-runs around the Constitution.
 

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