[bane]

Something else to watch for, whenever there's a really important piece of negative news about the government, there's almost always a piece of really trivial news about the entertainment industry or about a dramatic, but commonplace natural phenomenon (that's usually not reported at all) or a tragic death of an otherwise unremarkable, but photogenic young person, that will get far more news coverage and push the important bit off the front page.

I've found Western media is fairly subtle at it, but in some countries the media monopoly is such that it's done almost so ham-handedly as to be almost absurd. There's a few in the U.S. that are pretty clumsy about it too.

It's literally watching the shitty supermarket tabloids jump up from next to the candy bars to the number one national news story.

What's even more interesting is that the media, in a sort of faux meta-analysis, will acknowledge ways that stories are buried or minimized, that have nothing to do with the ways they actually bury and minimize important news -- the Friday bombshell press conference for example.