Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Earhart, Hoffa in love nest

Common cold cured, world peace breaks out, new car runs forever on blend of angel tears and spiderwebs! Evidently, all the real news in the world has already happened, because -- oh, let's have a look.

The skybox is all sports, which isn't unusual, but the big Monday rail is pretty barren as well: a retrospective, some weather, some features, and some teasers. Snow -- OK, it's Charlotte, so zomg SNOW!!!! -- makes sense as a centerpiece, but we basically have two takes on the same story here: Wow, the snow made it hard to get to the mall on Sunday! Wow, the snow might make it hard to get to work on Monday! At the bottom of the page, football players moonlight as film critics! Concert tickets won't be as expensive as they were last year!

Next time you hear someone yammering about the liberal news agenda, bear in mind that this is what it usually looks like. No paeans to the death panels. No veiled promotions of the Ground Zero Mosque and its cunning imam. No bank shots in which X defends Y for not denouncing Z's gaffe quickly enough. No attempts to provide the pictures to stir up the Third War* of the publisher's choosing. Just fluff -- fluff top to bottom, interrupted by five to eight inches of Fluffy White Stuff.

It'd be interesting to see what liberal** news might be, but first, someone's going to have to run some news.


* Don't miss Media Myth Alert's dissection of today's NYT cluelessness (and see how long the Times takes to quote its favorite pop-culture expert).
** You shouldn't take this too literally as a political label, but the Observer is actually a fairly good example of what it means to be "left-wing" in American press terms. It represents Presbyterian bankers who think segregation is immoral, rather than just bad for business. Don't expect it to get too exercised about unlawful wars of aggression or the lack of a public option for health care or stuff like that.

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