Flogging a Dead Horse

Nicholas Kristof should be commended for continuing to use his slot on the op-ed page to get the story out about the genocide in Dafur. However, he doesn't go nearly far enough in flogging other members of the media into covering the genocide. The fact is, the media would much rather cover Ben and Jen (who cares which Jen - Garner or Lopez), Jen and Brad (and Angelina), shark attacks, a single missing girl in Aruba (how much do those reporters get reimbursed for that assignment?), than do real investigative reporting on Dafur, Sudan, and the ongoing genocide.

We got more coverage of Andrea Mitchell getting manhandled than we did of the conditions and treatment of millions of Sudanese under the constant threat on their lives by the janjaweed and Sudanese militias. Why is this the case?

Who in the media has the willpower to step up to the plate and take on this issue that should transcend political leanings - genocide should not know from Left or Right. It should, however, know from action and not inaction.

Kristof complains that the newsweekly magazines and television networks haven't done nearly as good a job as a Christian magazine. Well, whose fault is that? It isn't the Christian magazine's fault. I'd say that the bloggers have done a better job than both of them combined, even though our resources are even more limited than any reporter.

The real failure has been television's. According to monitoring by the Tyndall Report, ABC News had a total of 18 minutes of the Darfur genocide in its nightly newscasts all last year - and that turns out to be a credit to Peter Jennings. NBC had only 5 minutes of coverage all last year, and CBS only 3 minutes - about a minute of coverage for every 100,000 deaths. In contrast, Martha Stewart received 130 minutes of coverage by the three networks.

Incredibly, more than two years into the genocide, NBC, aside from covering official trips, has still not bothered to send one of its own correspondents into Darfur for independent reporting.

One used to believe that reporters would love to go into war zones because that's where the action was. These reporters were adrenaline junkies and sought out these beats because that's how they could gain the recognition of fellow reporters and move up the journalistic food-chain.

Where is this generation's intrepid journalists taking on the real stories? Are they too busy sipping tea in a Baghdad hotel writing a novel on how the war is going badly for the US? Are they sitting in a Columbia University classroom complaining how bloggers do not have any accountability? Are they spinning wheels about a non-story about a non-secret CIA agent who wasn't outed by someone in the Administration and a journalist who didn't even write about the story is in jail because she refused to cooperate with the investigation?

If you look at why the media's grip has slipped, it is because they no longer judge what is news the way people (the consumer of news) views news. The growing schism only accelerates each time revelations of impropriety and scandal are discovered - not by journalists themselves, but by those outside the journalistic elites (the pajamahadeen).