Kurz, quoting Salon's Eric Boehlert who indeed nails the press:

Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a 'furious debate' nationwide? That's how Newsweek.com described the Schiavo story this week. Although it's not clear how a country can have a 'furious debate' when two-thirds of its citizens agree on the issue. . . . But the 'furious debate' angle has been a crucial selling point in the Schiavo story in part because editors and producers could never justify the extraordinary amount of time and resources they set aside for the story if reporters made plain in covering it every day that the issue was being driven by a very small minority who were out of step with the mainstream. . . .

"What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks as they pumped up what had been a long-simmering (seven years) family legal dispute and turned it into the most-covered story since a tsunami in Asia three months ago left approximately 300,000 people dead or missing."


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End of an Anchor Era
Monday, Apr 04, 2005; 8:46 AM

In the fall of 1988, Michael Dukakis was droning on in his impassive way when Ted Koppel cut him short: 'I still don't think you get it.' At that moment, the cognoscenti concluded, the presidential campaign was over.
In the summer of 1996, Koppel packed up and left the Republican convention in San Diego, assailing it as a non-news event and sparking a round of media soul-searching over such stage-managed extravaganzas.
In the spring of 2004, Koppel read the names of every American who had died in Iraq, prompting some affiliates to boycott his program as an unacceptably political statement.
What is it about Koppel's generation of larger-than-life anchors that their careers became so intertwined with the narrative of American history as experienced through the small screen? In a business where hotshot personalities come and go with the frequency of 'American Idol' contestants, why have the recent departures of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and now the 25-year host of 'Nightlin"