If It Bleeds (American Blood), It Leads...

Powerline reports on ABC News's desire to balance out coverage of the President's inauguration with a report on military funerals. Note that ABC is only looking for funerals of soldiers who died in Iraq, not in Afghanistan, Korea, or anywhere else:

Jan. 19, 2005 — For a possible Inauguration Day story on ABC News, we are trying to find out if there any military funerals for Iraq war casualties scheduled for Thursday, Jan. 20. If you know of a funeral and whether the family might be willing to talk to ABC News, please fill out the form below...

Now, ABC has every right to do all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth it wants over the Iraq war. But I wonder just how long people are going to keep watching. I, for one, wonder why so much attention is being paid to Iraq, when practically none is given to the genocide in Darfur, the mass starvation and extermination camps in N. Korea, the massive outbreak of malaria across Africa, and so on.

As artsy as such a pairing of stories might be, for ABC to cover a military funeral along with the inauguration is a blatant exhibition of the political nature of the war opposition. There is so much misery in the world that could easily be prevented by public action, and for the MSM to focus so myopically on the relatively minor hardships of the war is a disgrace. I do not lessen the sacrifices of the men and women who have fallen by any means; but the slaughter in Darfur is not going away, and is many times worse than anything that has happened since the Iraq invasion. Where is the outrage? Where is the continuing coverage? Where are the protests? Where is the furious lobbying to get the U.S. involved?

But for the U.S. to get involved with Darfur would be to confirm for all the world to see, again, that the Bush Doctrine is essentially valid, that the use of force is sometimes justified, and that the United Nations is incapable of fulfilling its supposed mission of securing world tranquility. The chattering classes, many of whom populate the halls of the MSM, are terrified of the prospect. They would much rather scream "Bush is Hitler!" and feel pleased with their own daring, like a four-year-old child sticking his tongue out at his parents.

So the media war continues. But I wonder how many of them truly fail to understand that the greatest weapon of a terrorist is media attention, or that America's center of gravity (the most vulnerable aspect of a state at war) is public opinion. I hope that the media elites are indeed ignorant, because the alternative is that they are knowingly giving the enemy material aid in their fight against America. In an earlier age, that would be called "treason."