NO NEWS IS BAD NEWS….The Outrage Of The Day™ (Media Edition) appears to be Radar’s report about the peculiar news judgment displayed in the new issue of Time magazine:
Is Time trying to bury the attorney general scandal that’s seized Washington, D.C., for the past three months? In just the last week, new documents emerged contradicting Alberto Gonzales’s account of his role in the firings, a low-level Department of Justice staffer announced her intent to plead the Fifth if asked to testify before Congress, and Justice officials admitted that it had misled Congress when it denied last month that Karl Rove played a role in deciding which U.S. attorneys got the boot. Yet the new issue of Time, on stands today, contains precisely zero stories on the scandal. Nothing. As though it’s not happening.
Well, sure. But as near as I can tell Time barely reports political news at all these days. After all, the passage of a bill calling for a timeline to withdraw from Iraq — seems like news to me! — got the same amount of attention as Alberto Gonzales did: none. The only piece of hard political news in the entire magazine this week is a short piece about the Democratic healthcare debate last Saturday.
This trend is, if I can coin a phrase, hardly news. Time has been getting steadily less newsy for years, and for better or worse, they just don’t cover breaking political events much anymore. That’s CNN’s job.
