OTM on the Mainline

MEDIA NOTES: On the Media NPR 020207

There are so many good pieces in this weeks On The Media, I don’t know where to begin. Maybe I’ll start with Brook Gladstone’s story about Scooter Libby’s perjury trial. She interviews Dana Milbank, who reports on Washington political theater for WaPoBrook’s #3 reason for caring about Scooter’s trial: “It gives news junkies the chance to mainline some high-octane gossip.” Yeah. Pass that needle, Nina Totenberg. Listen to the rush in Nina’s voice as she recaps this weeks testimony, including these nuggets from Scooter’s notes on a strategy chat with Mary Matalin: “Tell Tim (Russert). Tim (Russert) hates Chris (Matthews)” and “Wilson’s a snake.” Dan Schor takes the high road (really, no pun intended now, he sounds like the wise man he is): the Libby trial fascinates because it reveals details of a “failed cover-up.”

Back to OTM. Crossed Wires mashes up a montage of sound bites documenting cable news hysteria as the Boston bomb story broke on Wednesday. Listen to CNN nimbly shift attention away from its parent company (Turner Broadcasting) to those “third-party” bottom-feeders Interference Media. Bob Garfield injects some snarky tidbits along the way, decrying the saturation coverage as one more “display of the media beast consuming its own tail.”

Seriously now. Great Expectorations explores the mythology of war protesters spitting on war veterans. “It’s hardly the first time we’ve heard about returning soldiers getting showered with saliva. Sociologist Jerry Lembcke says the ‘spitting myth’ is both older and more recent than you might think.”

And finally, Anonymous Sects is an interview with Vali Nasr, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He briefed Bush last year about the differences between Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq. Bush’s rhetoric in the State of the Union speech played up the sectarian split, but it doesn’t reflect a newfound grasp of nuance, according to Nasr. Instead, it signals the administration’s effort to shift attention away from the intractable problems of stability in Iraq to a more appealing target: Iran.