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Celebrity foibles have always been significant components of "news", same for sports. Remember the old definition of "news" as "what is printed in newspapers". If the NYT, WP, or the AP wire don't carry the story, by definition it must not be news.
Sibel Edmonds and her information about possible high-level government corruption was not news, just CT rantings by the lunatics on the blogosphere.
Some stories just happen (balloon boy) and swamps most other stories. Other times, a group of stories will magically reappear at critical points in the coverage of other stories. On the surface, these stories do not seem in any way related to important news topic, but they are part of a greater marketing or psyops effort.
For example, the John Edwards-Rielle Hunter gets a push back onto the national MSM about a week prior to HCR hearings, votes, etc. becoming the top news story. In some cases there were obvious reasons for the coverage (grand jury appearance), but in many cases there was nothing new in the stories, just slight rewording of a couple of sentences from a story two months prior. For example, a story that Hunter was sighted house hunting along the NC coast was rerun by wral.com and went national again on the AP wire, although the sighting had been reported two months earlier.
Why would this matter? Edwards was already discredited and not part of the HCR debate. Reminding people of Edwards and campaign strenthens the mental link between Edwards and HCR, thus attaching his negatives to their opinion regarding HCR. This is minor stuff, but we are awash in this stuff.
The WikiLeaks release of the video showing the killing of civilians including two reporters working for Reuters should reveal a lot about efforts to limit coverage of damaging stories. So far, a search using Google News shows a few liberal blog sites (e.g. firedoglake) and Aljazeera. Wonder how long they can keep this story contained, particularly in US MSM. I suspect that this will be news in the UK because of the Reuters connection.
Keith or Rachel at MSNBC might well report this. Wonder how Fox will handle this one.
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