Neil Postman had this pegged

Big thanks to Bookworm for drawing my attention to an excellent post from Karl at Protein Wisdom on the shortcomings of mainstream coverage of the war in Iraq.

While I would gently dispute her assertion that it's more worthwhile than anything else you might read this month or even this year, what Karl says will open your eyes -- even if, like me, you track this stuff.

It occurred to me reading Karl's post that what it amounts to is an indictment of short attention spans. War in Iraq has gone on long enough that it bores the maintream media. And people like Neil Postman saw this coming, not about Iraq specifically, but about anything that TV covers.

Read or re-read Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, and see if I'm not right. The book is almost 22 years old, but its central message is as timely as ever. If Postman made a mistake in his forecasting, it was only in his fondness for the printed word over the televised image. He may have underestimated the degree to which even the printed word has been subverted in public discourse, but of course that's a painful thing for a writer to admit.

Not coincidentally, that development also has bearing on why I'm hard on journalists who fall down on the job. Like other bloggers, I'm keenly aware of sharing a tool set with people who are paid for their reporting and their commentary. When they shirk their responsibilities, they blunt the edges of words that I use, too. But it's not just me and my friends whom they mock in selling a birthright like integrity for a mess of pottage; their own souls shrivel at such carelessness, and could do nothing less, if we think through the implications of what the prologue to the gospel according to John actually means.

I will concede the ambition of that statement, but hear me out before calling it blasphemous or muddled. To put the matter differently, the pen is mightier than the sword everywhere but on the field of battle because the pen writes words. Moreover, with God, words and actions are the same, which is why a little nun who thought of herself as "God's Pencil" kept ministering to the poor of Calcutta and elsewhere even when she wasn't sure she was being held.

(Original entry linked to the wrong post. I fixed that)