The Good Reverend has an excellent post on the usual Blogs versus Big Media and our biases regarding the war in Iraq. His post isn’t boring at all, but he makes clear why (at least for me) the summer slowdown could not come in early enough on the heels of both Nick Berg’s death and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal:

Commentary overkill

In the Cold War, it was said that we had so many nukes pointed at Moscow that all most of them would do would be to “make the rubble bounce.” And with the prison and Berg stories, instead of talking about what happened, we are talking about how we are talking about what happened.

There just isn’t any “new news” coming from either case. All we are doing is recycling the same pictures and analysis over and over. Not even the courts-martials for prison offenders qualifies for the amount of “news” coverage Abu Ghraib still gets: there just isn’t that much to report. And nothing new has happened in the Berg story except the Iraqi authorities captured four suspects, let two go and still hold the other two. (Wonder what their treatment is like?)

Hence, what is going on now is dueling biases. Have the mainline media shoved Berg down the memory hole while they relentlessly hammer the prison abuse story? Unquestionably.

Are web commentati, including me, pretty much off the Abu Ghraib story and still pounding the keyboards about Berg’s murder and what it portends? Absolutely.

Both sides proceed from pre-existing biases. But are all biases equally objectionable or comparable? I don’t think so. Discriminating among choices with moral import and deciding which to choose is the fundamental problem of ethics.

— Donald Sensing: Dueling Biases

Hey. Color me cynical, but a lot of what we’re doing over the Abu Ghraib and Nick Berg issues is chasing our own tails. A small nugget of fresh red meat comes along and a feeding frenzy spirals out into the realm of rhetorical arguments and disagreements that really accomplish nothing. And at the heart of it all is the denial that the triumphant sensation is not only vulnerable, but short-lived. I’m done talking about Nick Berg, Abu Ghraib, and a long time ago, I’ve been done talking about John Kerry unless he makes a turn for the fiendish.

Believe it or not there’s a lot more things we can write about.