Overreported, Underreported

AlterNet draws up as naughty and nice list, per the season, of the media's to-do and over-done stories. So here's a reheated and reduced survey of their review of the year (with running deviations and my own links where relevant--a way to reflect on this four-month enterprise). I feign from reprinting the "DONE" and contributing to the ad nauseum, but here the list you could probably pull up from the top of your unconsciousness. But for those interested, read below: Shavio; Intelligent Design; The "War on Christmas"--although really that came late and is really concentrated and contained at Fox News headquarters; Continued Victory in Iraq (really, at least erect a Potemkin village and hire some more sophisticated pr); M. Jackson; Julia Robertson's baby (hmm, luckily missed that); Dr. Deans chairs the DNC (okay, I think the AlterNet list is getting out of hand); Sen. Pat Robert suggests a casual assassination; The Minutemen go nativist on the border. Ah, and now on to UNDER REPORTED: Dubya as lame duck; US devolves toward torture (more); Iraq Loss; Bin Landen never found; Downing Street memos;

The economy is balanced on a knife-edge. The Bush administration would like you to forget that the US has a record trade deficit, a record budget deficit, and that the housing market--the one thing that's kept the US economy afloat for the past three years--is beginning to cool a little too quickly for comfort. Republican attempts to balance the budget on the backs of poor people while trying to make Bush's tax cuts permanent have garnered little attention from the press. And so has the fact that China and Japan own most of our public debt. While Bush's approval ratings rise and fall with the price of oil, a very cold winter is hitting Americans in the pocketbooks, and the press can only talk about the economy "steaming full-speed ahead." Uh huh;

Environmental losses; Republican corruption scandals; Homeland Security ineffective (the hard-core security RAND Corp. verifies this assessment); Devastating earthquake in Kashmir; Pentagon propaganda campaign aboard; Israel withdraws from the west bank and the political spin-out; AFL-CIO split; Pennsylvanians block chain-mall construction (wow, even I didn't know about that).