Yeah, interested. It's not quite as bad, I'm not as elitist as I feared. Besides, the study was done before Harry Potter gained full force.

According to my very inaccurate statistics, I tend to read roughly 20 books a year, which likely makes me more than a bit suspect.

BTW, Digby's blog logo is Howard Beale from Network screaming.

Hilary, I don't believe that the lack of news coverage is the fault of the American people. When the Vietnam war was raging, every night there would be a report on the status of the war, the number of soldiers killed/wounded, the administration's response to what was happening and often times, the war's opposition response. People didn't "lose interest" in fact, the opposite happened, more and more people turned against the war and the carnage.

The administration complained bitterly and incessantly that there was too much coverage and that the coverage was turning the people against the war. It was an active, conscious choice by this administration (whose members were part of the Nixom administration) to limit and discourage coverage of this war to exercise absolute control over the message. We also have a press that actively colluded and were complicit in promoting this war for many reasons, one being the perception that if they strayed off message they would lose "access" to the administration and their sources would dry up. (I won't get into the fact that they never had access anyway, because controlled access is no access.)

In the aftermath of the Vietnam war it was a common perception that the press was responsible for this country's loss of that war - if only the press hadn't been so negative, the American people would have persevered and the war would have been won. It is such a common perception that the press itself believes it to be true - the last thing they want is to be perceived as "anti American" or "unpatriotic" - they are terrified of being painted with that brush. Then we have organizations like NBC whose ownership directly benefits from the war industry, a company that makes far more profit from war than they do on the news division. Most of the major networks are owned by corporations who either profit or think that lack of support will hurt the bottom line. Would the Disney corporation allow themselves to be tainted with the label of "unAmerican" or "unpatriotic" if they aired negative or critical reports of the administration and the war? (Dan Rather, Peter Arnett, Phil Donahue, Leslie Bamfield are good examples of what happens when you do step out of line with the message.)

We have no idea if people have lost interest in this war or if they're bored or they don't want to know anything about it. We don't know that because there is no coverage and there hasn't been any coverage since it began. How can people lose interest in something that has never been covered in the first place and continues to appear less and less in any media? How do we know that more coverage would not make more people interested and apt to seek information? We don't. We take the media's word for it that people are bored and uninterested, a media that has a reason for promoting this meme.

There are many reasons why magazines have different circulation numbers, one of them is cost, one is interest and one is usefulness. You example of GH and Newsweek is a case in point - GH is 12.00 a year and Newsweek almost a 100.00 and while I won't get into all the variables of niche reading etc, I can tell you why I don't buy Newsweek and Time anymore - they're no longer news magazines. More often than not, their cover stories aren't "news" articles, they're pop culture articles which hold little if any interest to me. (I know why kids are fat - they eat junk food and don't exercise, a story Newsweek could have covered with one sentence.)

So yes, I do blame the media for this mess - their mission isn't to entertain, it isn't to opine and gossip, it is to inform and maybe if they did their job right they would create some interest in what is going on in the world.

That Walt Kelly quote works for me, as does Gandhi's “Be the change you want to see in the world" ... and both ring truer than the newfangled "We are the change that we seek" ...

No, we're not. That we should be, that we must become - something other than what we obviously are - is all good. To imagine that we already are all that is a bridge too far for some of us citizens of a certain country waging a certain kind of war that still rages on in our names.

No, but showing a modicum of tact over the thousands of our fellow citizens that have, indeed, killed themselves over the war is obviously too much to ask.

Sometime I forget that there are quite a few crass louts on the net.