See how they wallow in the second week of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and Nick Berg barely gets any ink?  Notice how the first 10 minutes of the nightly news has been about Abu Ghraib for TWO WEEKS?  But guess what Americans actually care about?  What's the story they want to hear about?  Nick Berg! And Americans are not getting it from the mainstream media, so by default they have to turn to politcal/news blogs.

This is why blogs are so important.  Read this from www.instapundit.com

WHY THE BIG MEDIA CONTINUE TO LOSE THEIR AUDIENCE: Neal Boortz observes:


This morning in most of the newspapers I scanned during my preparation for the show the top story was still the Iraqi prison abuse scandal. Nick Berg had already disappeared from many front pages, but the prison abuse stories remain. May I suggest to you that there is a reason for this? Maybe it's just this simple: The prison abuse scandal can damage Bush, the Nick Berg story can only help him. Given the choice many editors will chose the stories that serve their cause, getting Bush out of the White House, rather than one that hurts it.


Such cynicism about the media, these days. But he's right. The Berg video wasn't shown on TV, and -- as Boortz notes -- the big media leaders seem almost desperate to keep the story on Abu Ghraib, even to the point of running already discredited fake porn photos purporting to be from Iraq. (And issuing lame and incomplete pseudo-apologies when caught out.)

But on the Internet, where users set the agenda, not Big Media editors and producers, it's different. As Jeff Quinton notes, Nick Berg is the story that people care about:


Right now the 10 phrases most searched for are:
nick berg video
nick berg
berg beheading
beheading video
nick berg beheading video
nick berg beheading
berg video
berg beheading video
"nick berg"
video nick berg


Likewise, Rod Dreher of the Dallas Morning News reports that that's what his readers care about:


Our letters page today is filled with nothing but Berg-related letters, most of them demanding that the DMN show more photos of the Berg execution. Not one of the 87 letters we received on the topic yesterday called for these images not to be printed. My sense is that there's a big backlash building against the media for flogging the Abu Ghraib photos, but being so delicate with the Berg images. People sense that there's an agenda afoot here. As somebody, can't remember who, wrote yesterday, "Why is it that the media can show over and over again pictures that could make Arabs hate Americans, but refuse to show pictures that could make Americans hate Arabs?"


These guys are marginalizing themselves with their agenda-driven coverage. And they're so out of touch they don't realize it. As Andrew Sullivan notes:


My gut tells me that the Nick Berg video has had much more psychic impact in this country than the Abu Ghraib horrors. I even notice some small evidence for this. Every political blog site has just seen an exponential jump in traffic - far more than anything that occurred during the Abu Ghraib unfolding. My traffic went through the roof yesterday, and, according to Alexa, so did everyone else's. People who have tuned the war out suddenly tuned the war in. They get it. Will the mainstream media?


My prediction: Nope, and they'll continue to lose audience to the Internet.

UPDATE: It's not just Jeff Quinton. Here's what Lycos reports as its top requests:


Nick Berg is the new number one search term on the Lycos Search engine over the past 24 hours. The top 10 search requests Web users are specifically searching for regarding Nick Berg are:

1. Nick Berg video
2. Nick Berg Beheading
3. Nick Berg and Iraq
4. Nick Berg Execution
5. Nick Berg Beheading Video
6. Nick Berg Killing
7. Nick Berg murder
8. Nick Berg assassination
9. Nick Berg decapitation video
10. Execution of Nick Berg.

The video showing the beheading of U.S. captive Nick Berg, combined with the multitude of search activity for the War in Iraq and searches for the Iraqi prisoners of war, is generating 12 times more searches than the #2 search term, Paris Hilton.



posted at 01:34 PM by Glenn Reynolds





     

The lives of innocent Muslims is more important than any American - least in the eyes of the liberal ass media. The media may not carry AK-47's or RPG's but possess a WMD much more deadily - seditious propaganda.

The days of big news media telling what to see and believe are over. We can sign on to whatever web site we please and actually see for ourselves, no need for the elitist liberal news editors to "interpret" the news for us. Pretty straight forward. The news media is loosing its grip on disseminating what is "news."

Personally I'm disgusted with TV news and am done with it completley! This morning there was 10 minutes of the f@$%ing prison pictures and a quick 5 SECOND spot on the Berg murder, Oh yeah thats right now it's just a murder to them not even a beheading anymore!

Who's Nick Berg?
(I swear to God, it's going to take everything in me to keep from kicking the shit out of the first person who says that to me)

Most excellent post. I was wondering about that just last night.



Thank you raven.
-LS