Chart of the day

A study of last week's most covered stories from The Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. Which really should be changed to Project for "Excellence" in "Journalism". It found that while health care was the big story of the week, balloon boy came in a strong third ahead of Afghanistan and Pakistan in our intelligent national discourse. On the other hand Falcon Heene, or "That little lying shit" as we all know him, was the week's second most covered "newsmaker". Placing second to the most powerful leader in the world, who also coincidentally got stuck in a balloon, but was able to extricate himself with the help of the Secret Service, Sasha, Malia, and a pointed stick.

I know some of you are angrily saying "I can't believe it was ahead of the two areas we're about to escalate a war in the week lots of big news comes out about it!" I think the better question is: Only third place? I think that had a function to do with the fact that the balloon boy story happened on a Thursday and therefore wasn't given a full week's worth of coverage like that health care bullshit was. I'm sure if that family pulled that hoax on a Monday or Sunday evening, we would have seen some serious media abdication of journalistic responsibilities. As such, real news was actually allowed to break through during the week, though thankfully not on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and most of Sunday.

Sadly, I think we're going to have to suffer through real news on a national level for most of this week. Hopefully some kid gets caught adrift in a homemade catamaran or falls down a well or something so we don't have to hear about health care or any of our old wars on the evening news.