Arianna Huffington: Bombs vs Bombshells Revisited

[Jack Rabbit]

From the Huffington Post
Dated Tuesday May 2

Bombs vs Bombshells Revisited
By Arianna Huffington

Back in March, I took the CBS Evening News to the Ed Murrow Memorial Woodshed for devoting more airtime to Anna Nicole Smith's Supreme Court appearance than to the explosive situation in Iraq:

It says everything you need to know about the current state of TV news -- indeed the current state of our media culture -- that on a day that saw Iraq moving closer to all-out civil war, with at least 76 Iraqis killed and 179 wounded in sectarian attacks, the CBS Evening News devoted one minute and thirty-nine seconds to coverage of Iraq... and one minute and fifty-six seconds to coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's appearance in front of the Supreme Court . . . ..

Of course, the Mrs. Smith Goes to Washington story came with all that irresistible B-roll of Anna Nicole jiggling her way through a pack of jostling paparazzi into the High Court, and allowed producers to re-hash 5-year-old file footage of Smith testifying that her marriage to octogenarian billionaire J. Howard Marshall was true love... Hard for civil war to top that.

With Anna Nicole's Supreme Court victory yesterday, Bob Schieffer and company got another bite at the Bombs vs Bombshells apple. So how'd they do?

Well, it depends how you slice it.

Read more.