Pirates, Puppies and Tea Parties

Are you as glad as I am that this week is finally drawing to a close?

With the faltering economy finally getting some competition from other events, some of them (gasp!) of the international sort; it is enough to make a citizen wonder: should I really be afraid of pirates?  

Modern-day pirates (sans eye patches and hooks for hands) have actually been in the news since 1999.  There's been an uptick in activities by Somali pirates and increasing coverage about it since November, but it did not capture the American media's attention until one of our own was captured. I found The Guardian's coverage and archives on the subject pretty interesting. You may too. 

According to the Pew Research Center, the pirate story came close to receiving almost as much coverage as the economic crisis/meltdown/downward spiral.  Is this a good thing? Maybe we are experiencing economic crisis fatigue and thus are more interested in such newsy items as the the new pup on Pennsylvania Avenue. Or maybe the more likely scenario is that the mainstream media is tired of reporting on the economy.  I mean, job losses after job losses, plunging Dow after plunging Dow--how many different ways can they really tell that story?  Oh but wait, that is actually their job.

As for the widely publicized tea parties on Wednesday, and while we're on the subject of reporters doing their job, I think James Rainey of the L.A. Times put it best, calling out FOX for promoting and hyping these protests, and MSNBC for trying to downplay and marginalize the participants... all before anything even happened. Wrote Rainey:

"I've got a novel idea: How about if we wait and see what happens at these rallies? Maybe journalists can watch, report how many people are there, describe the kinds of things they say and tell us what they plan to do next."  

I think he is suggesting that journalists actually practice the craft of journalism. Weird, right?

All I can say about Bo Obama is that a Google search elicits 3,496 news articles about the dog. That doesn't include the countless hours of footage, coverage and interviews on radio and t.v.  Maybe it is just the kind of good news people are looking for, except that a lot of it is pretty critical of the breed--a Portuguese Water dog-- and about the fact that they didn't adopt a shelter dog, but of course you knew that. 

Fine then. But do you know which country owns most of our debt? Or what the current unemployment rate is? Here's a quiz for you to test your "real" news knowledge. You may end up much more scared of our national debt than pirates.