Brad Jacobson is resurrecting the "NYT Front|Back" feature of his Media Bloodhound blog (7/10/09)--spotlighting the New York Times' "penchant for placing a supremely unnewsworthy story on its cover while burying a vital one in its back pages"--only for "the most egregious and absurd examples."

The current example being their July 7 front-page headliner, "In Sex Film Industry, Some Long for a Real Plot":

No, this isn't satire. It's a cover story on our nation's paper of record.... The article opens:

The actress known as Savanna Samson once relished preparing for a role. "I couldn’t wait to get my next script," she said.

There's no reason to look at them anymore, she said, because her movies now call almost exclusively for action. Specifically, sex.

Jacobson commiserates with the Times editors' concerns: "Two wars. Jobless rate at nearly 10 percent. Healthcare in crisis. And if that weren't enough to bear, now there are dwindling plot lines in our pornography!"

Meanwhile, the same day's placement of an "In Senate, Debate on Detainee Legal Rights" piece way back on page A18 has Jacobson convinced that "apparently the Times thinks Americans are, as the kids say, so over the issue of detainee rights that the dearth of pornography plots trumped this story by 18 pages":

Intro:

Obama administration lawyers said Tuesday at a Senate hearing that detainees prosecuted by military commissions should have some of the same constitutional rights as American citizens tried in civilian criminal courts....

"So you are saying that these people who are in Guantánamo, who were part of 9/11 or committed acts of war against the United States are entitled to constitutional rights of the Constitution of the United States?" Sen. John McCain of Arizona, the senior Republican on the panel, asked administration officials at one point.

Looking past "this article's banishment to the back pages," Jacobson notes how "the story fails to include a substantive factual rejoinder to Senator McCain's misleading statement"--the facts being that "scores of detainees have already been released by the U.S.," but only "after being held for years with no charge and incurring what the Times calls 'brutal' interrogation techniques but the rest of the world calls 'torture.'"

Looking beyond "the yellow-tape segments that bleed and lead local TV news" Norman Solomon (Creators Syndicate, 6/13/09) discerns what he dubs "Media's Love/Hate Affair with Violence"--as exemplified by

the kind of violence--rarely occurring in the light of day--that gets scant media attention. With somewhere around 2 million people behind bars in the United States, all kinds of violent acts are happening in the nation's prisons and jails. The violence that some guards inflict on prisoners is even less apt to make the news than what stressed-out prisoners do to one another.

Various forms of what could be called "institutionalized violence" are not identified as such in the standard reportorial lexicons. When children go to bed hungry--or when people can't see a doctor and then wind up in emergency rooms with serious medical conditions that could have been prevented with earlier healthcare--some very cruel hotwired violence is underway. But from a boilerplate media standpoint, it's part of the regular social order.

And that's all aside from journalistic adoration of "the U.S. war-fighting establishment--what outgoing President Dwight Eisenhower called the 'military-industrial complex.'" Solomon concludes: "In short, according to tacit judgments that dominate the media establishment, reprehensible violence doesn't include the violence that goes unrebuked by prevailing authority structures in our society."

David Sirota has a new column (Creators Syndicate, 3/27/09) chronicling the nature of "newspapers' self-inflicted blows":

First, financially strapped newspapers undermined their comparative advantage by replacing audience-attracting local exclusives with cheaper national content. Then the providers of that national content diverted resources from tough-to-report investigative journalism that builds loyal readership and into paparazzi-like birdcage liner that unconvincingly portrays politicians, CEOs and their minions as celebrities.

Former journalist David Simon, "whose HBO series The Wire examined this trend," gives Sirota the awful truth: "In place of comprehensive, complex and idiosyncratic coverage, readers of even the most serious newspapers were offered celebrity and scandal, humor and light provocation."