It continues.

As I said last week, I think the event in Tucson is truly a tragedy. The deaths are heartbreaking and we are all wishing the best for Gabrielle Giffords. But again I think the media is going way overboard on coverage. It has now been a week and it is still the top news story. Not the floods and deaths in Brazil, 631 victims to date. Not the floods in Australia and the, as yet, unknown damage. No, we are interviewing schoolchildren on a baseball field in Tucson to see what they think about the future of their city. We are told, happily, that another child was saved because of organ donations from Cristina Taylor Green. What's happening to the cholera-ridden children in Haiti? Giffords's husband has a TV special on Tuesday night. Will there ever be a special featuring a scientist discussing global warming? Maybe people aren't interested in serious news. But that's not the issue. The issue is that the news media, notably broadcast news, are determining what we should and should not know. The Tuscon story is easy for them: remotes, sad stories, recaps, interviews, follow-ups, doctors' reports, anchors with sad facial expressions. But most of it is manipulative and unnecessary coverage. The world is increasingly complex, ergo: dangerous. Yet we are mired in minutuae and kept from understanding the world situation. We know more about Justin Bieber than we do about North Korea or China. We know animals have been dropping dead throughout the world. We don't know why? If America, as many believe, is becoming more violent does that mean that we'll have wall-to-wall coverage on every new shooting event and never learn another thing about the rest of the world?