As has already been diaried and frontpaged, Judge Diggs Taylor declared Bush's NSA wiretapping "program" to be unconstitutional, saying it:
"violates the separation of powers doctrine, the Administrative Procedures Act, the First and Fourth amendments to the United States Constitution, the FISA and Title III."
At this very moment (1:26pm CDT), the story is #2 at CNN, #1 at Yahoo News, #2 at Faux News, #1 at MSNBC, #2 at ABC, and #2 at CBS.
Remarkably, much of the news media is putting substantially more emphasis on the JonBenet Ramsey case. While fascinating in a car-wreck sort of way, a 10-year-old murder case shouldn't take precedence over a federal judge ruling the
Goddamn President of the United States' behavior as unconstitutional.
Here's what I suggest we do:
Let's each adopt a certain network or cable news program for tonight and monitor their coverage of the NSA ruling.
Who wants one of the network nightly news telecasts? Who wants Wolf? Who wants Fox? Who wants Paula? Who wants Olbermann? You get the idea.
1. Adopt a station and a time period in the comments.
2. Monitor that station, and time how many minutes are devoted to JonBenet, and how many minutes are devoted to the NSA ruling.
3. Make note of the guests on the shows (speaking about the NSA ruling). Also note the "angle" on the report -- subjective or objective.
If this diary is still around after you're done monitoring, enter your findings in the comments. If it's not, feel free to start a new "Media Monitor" diary.
Once we've all had a chance to see the results, we'll decide what kind of pressure, if any, we need to exert on the networks.
I don't think it's an overstatement to say that this ruling is historical on a variety of fronts. It may or may not hold up to appeals, but for now, the POTUS has had his peepee slapped by in a sunstantial and unprecedented way. Let's not let the MSM sensationalize a 6-year-old's death just to grab a few ratings points, when something of this magnitude is going on.