James Lileks is a Minnesota treasure, and his take on Nightline's decision to bump coverage of the President's bellwether speech at Whitehall to cover, of all things, Michael Jackson is a terrific example:

You know what? Michael Moore is right. There are many Americans who are ignorant of the world around them. And they’re all TV news producers. Two big bombs in Istanbul, and what’s the big story of the day? Following around a pervy slab of albino Play-Doh as he turns himself into the police. I was stunned to discover last night that Nightline not only covered the Jackson case in detail, but bumped coverage of the Whitehall speech, which was the most important speech since the Iraq campaign began and arguably the most important speech of the war, period.

You would expect that a major commercial media outlet like ABC, with a supposedly top-notch news program like Nightline, would be able to distinguish between what should have been a news flash and a major development in a critical policy change announced by a president in a speech made during a state visit. But apparently Ted Koppel and company believe the arrest status of a pop singer is more important, which should call into question Nightline's editorial policy, as Lileks also emphatically says:

Nightline, supposedly the Thinking Person’s Late Night Show, was split about whether a repudiation of 50 years of foreign policy was slightly more important than the arrest of a washed-up, crotch-grabbing yee-hee! squeaking nutball who was probably the horrid pedophile everyone already thought he was.

Read the whole thing. Later in the Bleat, he takes on a suddenly snarky Salaam Pax and in typically blunt Midwestern fashion, tells him to grow up. (via Instapundit)

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Tracked on June 23, 2005 1:24 PM