WHEN THE NEWS ABOUT THE WAR FUNDING BILL BECOMES THE LACK OF NEWS ABOUT THE WAR FUNDING BILL

By Jerry D. Rose

Some subjects for blog entry percolate in my consciousness over several days and I start to look for more information on those subjects. In the last 24 hours this percolation process has been short-lived as a result of the debate and voting on the supplemental funding bill for U.S. military operations with a spirited finish to the debate, a narrow vote in favor of the bill at 6:27 P.M. and then…a deafening silence on the matter in the mainstream media. Having heard much of the informative debate on C-span, I had to miss the vote itself and turned on the ABC’s 6:30 news hoping to hear the result. There was nothing on that newscast, as other observers of CBS and NBC reported, and as verified from logs of those broadcasts. Well, I thought, vagaries of the news cycle, vote is taken 3 minutes before these broadcasts air, it’s understandable, etc.

When I went this morning to online versions of the New York Times and BBC, I found that these titans of world news, with plenty of time to have produced stories on the vote, still had none, save an obscure entry in the Times blog called Caucus. Then was when I opened my local daily newspaper, the Gainesville Sun, and found that this paper as well had not a single word about the vote, the debate that led up to it or what might be its consequences not only for future U.S. military activities; but for those of the bill’s “attached” provisions dealing with the IMF and with swine flu epidemic funding. Knowing that the Sun is owned by the New York Times and often reprints news articles from the Times, this did not surprise me too much. But the Sun also relies heavily on stories distributed by the Associated Press, and I was left wondering why an article had not come from that source and been printed in the Sun.

This wonderment took me to the website of the AP and I finally found that an obscure corner of that website contained a posting at 6:12 A.M., time enough for printing by papers that did not have an early morning deadline before that time (or a “breaking news” feature that allows for late-arriving stories to be posted.) I then surveyed 9 of the largest circulation papers in Florida and found that only one of them, the Palm Beach Post, carried the AP story, though all of them did carry many other AP stories, many of them about matters concerning activities and personalities in Congress (like the Senator who “admitted” an affair).

Finally, reflecting on all of these anomalies, I cannot help harboring a tinge of suspicion that the timing of the vote as well as the posting of the AP’s story were in fact designed to minimize immediate news coverage. I’m sure the vote could have been timed more “conveniently” for evening news converge than 6:27 P.M.; and the Associated Press had nearly 12 hours between the vote and the posting of its lone story on the event: at a time that would not discourage local newspaper posting, especially in the eastern time zone.
As a bottom line to this, I have just watched this evening’s ABC News broadcast and found that, with now nearly 24 hours to round up some kind of report and discussion of the event, they could still not manage a single word about anything related to the war funding bill. Of course, they had many other big stories to report; after yesterday’s blockbuster coverage of Obama catching a fly with his hand, they had to gush over the story of Phil Michelson’s perennial search for an Open Golf title and the distraction in his life of a beloved wife with breast cancer. Only so much you can do in a half-hour, you know.

Jerry D. Rose – Editor, The Sun State Activist