In
August, two news stories broke the same day - one meaty, one junky.
In Detroit, U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled that the Bush
administration's warrant-less National Security Agency surveillance
program was unconstitutional and must end. Meanwhile, somewhere in
Thailand, a man named John Mark Karr claimed he was with six-year-old
beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey when she died in 1996.
Predictably, the mainstream media devoted acres of newsprint and hours of airtime to the self-proclaimed beauty-queen killer, including stories on what he ate on the plane ride home, his desire for a sex change, his child-porn fixation, and - when DNA tests proved Karr wasn't the killer - why he confessed to a crime he didn't commit.
During that same time period, few words were written or said in the same outlets about Judge Diggs Taylor's ruling and the questions it raised about due process in the context of the "war on terror."
