Print Vs. Play

I recently posted about the armed stand-off at the Southern border. A pal of the blog left this comment...

I've never heard anything like this before. You'd think that the feds wouldn't put up with this crap.

Now mind you this is a smart plugged in guy*, so why wouldn't he have heard about this? It's been going on for years, its happened several hundred times. So why don't people know about this?

It has to do with the play a story gets. See, when you report the news you have options in how you present the story. Above the fold, below the fold. Front page or buried. Different days of the week have different readership levels so if you don't want a story to get much play there are a variety of strategems that can be employed to make sure the story that gets reported doesn't get much attention.

And border violence does get reported, it just doesn't get play. Once a year one of the TV news mags will run a border story, the newspapers cover the minimum possible and hope like hell the stories go away because these folks love illegals. I have no idea why, but if you read the reporting of almost every mainstream (ha!) journalist, given three ounces of scotch and a quick cuddle would carry any illegal aliens baby to term. It ain't pretty, but what're you gonna do?

Think about the NYT's, anything they feel wouldn't please Karl Marx has a nasty habit of falling into the cavernous interior of the paper never to be seen again.

Anything that embarrasses the president might as well be tattoed on your eyelids.

If the president skipped his bran one fine morning the esteemed Paul Krugman could turn that into a week's worth of breathless headlines. Mexican military incursions on the Southern border, yawn, what's that?

Follow ups are a tool the press uses to push what they want us to think is important. I haven't seen a lot of follow up on the border stories. A couple yes, but this is a huge story, or ought to be.
Ironically this is probably the one and only place the Mainstream Media and the current administration agree.

How sad.

* When I say 'smart' & 'plugged in' I of course mean wildly, staggeringly drunk and possibly clad in a kilt. Have a nice day.

illegal immigration
Paul Krugman
How Things Work