h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

A running story in the US is the disappearance of a female intern Chandra Levy. The congressman she worked for has admitted to having a sexual relationship with her in the months before she went missing.

How big a story is the Chandra Levy case? In the week July 16-23, 37 minutes were devoted to the case on the NBC Nightly News. Nine minutes were devoted to the case on ABC's World News Tonight. No minutes were devoted to it on the CBS Evening News. There have been seven front-page stories on the case since May in the New York Post and two front-page stories on it in the New York Times (up to July 23)

Source: The freely distributed (moderators it is not copyright) Tyndall Report.

Going by those statistics, it would appear that what is and what isn't news, is largely a matter of unstated opinion.

Or maybe bizarre coverage of a story, such as shown here, is confined to the land of the rave and the twee.

Americans!!..You've got to love/hate them.

One of the sadder examples of the dumbing down of hard news coverage in Yankeeland is the demise of CNN as a cutting-edge news-breaker.

Since its sale to AOL TimesWarner, all the one-time ground-breaking cable news channel seems to cover nowadays are hours of stockmarket reports (surprise, surprise) interspaced with turgid discussions of the Levy case held between second-rate 'media celebraties' and the seven-times married, look-at-me poser, Larry King.

How much does this story affect those of us in Britain? I'd venture: very little, to not at all. Yet we keep hearing about it too. Not to mention the idle, irrelevent speculation such as that in the Daily Mail (bloody awful) which used the story to discuss the burgeoning US BDSM scene.
What?!

No, the American scandal stories do not affect many people. I find them annoying even when they refer to the president's private life with all the extras. What frightens me though is that the Chandra Levy news coverage or lack of coverage is much more common than we think. A lot of information is sorted and censured by the media and as you wrote earlier - it is a matter of opinion what goes on the news and what doesn't. So, whenever I hear about a flashy scandal I keep thinking about the broadcast minutes that could have been used for something worth the attention. Now let's talk about freedom of speech...