The Useless Press (Part 9,839 in a Series)

Cernig from Newshog emailed me to let me know that I missed one of the AP stories about the Downing Street Documents:

Memos Show British Concern Over Iraq Plans

(Thanks, Cernig!)

I don’t know what that brings their grand total to, but if I had to guess, it wouldn’t be more than 20, and that’s probably being generous. Apropos of Paul’s post about FAIR’s report on the media’s justification of why they haven’t covered the Memos, I went through and counted how many posts I’ve written about them since I first mentioned the then-only leaked memo on May 26. I stopped counting at 60.

Now, I’m admittedly driven to the brink of a meltdown with disseminating information on this subject (and it’s not because I hate Bush; it’s because I don’t want my country behaving this way, irrespective of who’s running it), but it’s probably safe to assume that most members of the alliance haven’t written quite so much on the topic (although I’m sure there are some who have written more than I). So let’s assume that the average Big Brass Alliance member has, in the past month, written 20 posts about the Downing Street Memos. There are now 528 member blogs. That’s 10,560 posts.

And that doesn’t count the bloggers who aren’t members of the alliance, which includes most of the biggest lefty blogs. How many dKos diaries alone have been written about it? The Awaken the Mainstream Media campaign issues at least one post a day, and is affiliated with DowningStreetMemo.com, which has also been pushing the story.

The American media ought to be ashamed of itself.

I have a full-time job already. So do most of the bloggers who are regularly writing about this story. I’m sure we’d all appreciate it if we didn’t have to spend our free time doing your jobs for you, too.

[UPDATE: Democracy Guy reports on today's Sunday Cleveland Plain Dealer doing its job. And the San Francisco Chronicle, which has been one of the few publications that's done right by this story, has a good opinion piece worth checking out, too. Thanks to Oddjob for the pointers.]