Beyond "Burying the Lede"
Stories So Damaging to Bush's Plans, the US Media Ignores Them
by Tamara Baker

March 6, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- If you follow the foreign press, then you've known for the past two days about the world-shaking exposé in the pages of the UK Observer.

I refer to the story wherein the Bush Junta is accused, and pretty convincingly, of spying on certain UN representatives -- and tapping their phones -- in an effort to twist more arms into supporting its planned invasion of Iraq.

Ever since the story broke on Saturday night (Sunday morning in the UK, hence the March 2nd dating), I've been wondering what notice, if any, the US media would take of this story -- a story that, as Salon's Jake Tapper reports, has been the Number One story in Russia and France, made the front pages of newspapers in Australia, and led Canadian television to hold an interview with Martin Bright, the Observer article's author.

And the answer is: Aside from a few feeble Drudge-fueled attempts to debunk it, as described by Jake Tapper, almost none. CBS News has mentioned the story on its website, but not on the air, as far as I've heard.

This isn't just "burying the lede" -- it's dropping it into the center of the earth.

But, as pathetic as our seventeenth-ranked US media has been at covering that story, that isn't the worst atrocity they've committed in the last week.

Heck, at least the US press pretended to cover the UN tapping story. But another story, of potentially far, far greater importance, has yet to be mentioned, even on US media websites.

The story? Oh, nothing much.

It's just that the remains of what is claimed to be a North Korean warhead were allegedly found in Alaska. I say "allegedly", but, as the Korea Times article makes clear, South Korea and Japan are taking this very, very seriously indeed. And their reaction, if nothing else, rates a major story in the US press.

But this gets in the way of pretending that Saddam Hussein is a bigger threat that Kim Jong-Il, so guess what? Into the Marianas Trench it goes. I'd say that it went into the Memory Hole, but first it'd actually have to be reported in the US for this to happen.

Oh, well. Just another week in the life of our seventeenth-ranked US press corpse.