US Media go Slow-mo on Downing Street

There's a lot of huff going around about bloggers and journalists lately but I read this excellent Salon article posted at freepress.com on the Downing Street Minutes and thought journalism as we knew it died when the major media morphed from a source of news to a political PR machine. Forget the ivory tower. This is the new media - bubble up journalism.

It's been five weeks since the story broke in the UK and the broadcast networks and other major media are just sort of starting to mention it. The execs that answer to the seven Bush Rangers who own them, say oh, they didn't cover it because it didn't break any new ground. So we all knew Bush was a liar and manipulated the world into going to war because they covered the story so well right along? Eric Boehlert's piece has the statistics on that.

According to TVEyes, an around-the-clock monitoring service, between May 1 and June 6 the story received approximately 20 mentions on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS combined. (With Blair’s arrival in Washington Tuesday, there was a slight spike in mentions but still very little reporting of substance.)

By contrast, during the same five-week period, the same outlets found time to mention 263 times the tabloid controversy that erupted when a photograph showing Saddam Hussein in his underwear was leaked to the British press.

[As of] May 1, White House spokesman Scott McClellan has held 19 daily briefings, at which he has fielded approximately 940 questions from reporters, according to the White House's online archives. Exactly two of those questions have been about the Downing Street memo and the White House's reported effort to fix prewar intelligence. (Three weeks after the memo was leaked in Britain, McClellan prefaced a response to a question about it by telling White House reporters he was not familiar with "the specific memo."

Team Bush thought they could sweep it under the rug again but I think perhaps we are witnessing the first fruits of the left blogosphere's organizing into a coherent voice, having learned our lesson in 04.

...On Tuesday, a query on the blog search engine Technorati retrieved 3,039 sites on which the Downing Street memo was being discussed.

Now that they're forced to admit it's a story, the MSM have taken a peculiar tack. They're pretending they already covered it.

That's just the latest press oddity surrounding the memo story, says Swanson at AfterDowningStreet.org. "It’s very strange that when it now comes up in the media, it's described as well known. It's not well known. Most people don't know anything about the memo. It’s very disturbing."

Very disturbing indeed. Worth reading in full.

More links and commentary at The Detroit News.