Letters to the Editor
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the eating and the having of the media cake
Aren't I part of the media-industrial complex that has been rightly raked over the coals over the past few years for almost universally ignoring the exploding performance-enhancing-drug issue in American non-Olympic sports, especially baseball, from the '80s onward?
It's critically important that reporters look under every stone, examine every bit of muck, and do hard hitting journalistic reporting that gets to the truth of the matter. It's just that nobody wants to read it.
Exactly the same thing is happening with Iraq, and a thousand other important stories. We want for there to be good reporting; we want to know that our leaders can't get away with scummy behavior and lying and failure and coverups. We just don't feel like reading the reporting that is generated on the way.
In the current case, nobody cares about some schlub who dealt drugs. The story is important, sure, but not really interesting. Name some big names, and it will make people sit up and listen. Nobody cared that Gonzales made a thousand unethical choices, but as soon as he made a single high profile mistake, the media was all over him. Same thing.
My opinion: keep up the digging and the muck-raking. People won't care, until it really matters, and then they'll care deeply (and be pissed that not enough work was done before that nobody wanted to read).