It was news of national import: Some men may have committed armed robbery in Las Vegas.

Stop the presses, everyone! Somebody call Walter Cronkite out of retirement! O.J.'s back!

That stiff breeze you felt was the huge sigh of relief from news channel executives. (That missing-British-kid-in-Portugal story was losing its zazz.) While the Katrina-force winds emanating from White House staffers signaled their relief that, with the citizenry contemplating the possible theft of sports memorabilia, Bush can continue spending $2 billion a week to kill American service members.

Okay, I'm exaggerating a bit. It's not like the media never tackle the really important issues. In fact, I have the transcript of a typical news channel political discussion right here (content edited for brevity):


Thanks, America's most trusted news source!

Twenty-four hours is a lot of time to fill, but it gets easier when a few flips of the Rolodex lands enough professional opiners to last the day.

Everybody wins. The opiners get the honor of someone on TV talking to them. And the news shows get the content they need with no legwork, no digging (except in the Rolodex.) There's no tedious record search, no midnight parking-garage rendezvous, no intricate piecing together of the puzzle. There are no puzzles. (Well, there are, but we no longer care if they're solved.) There's only the press conference to attend, the public statement to repeat, the police report to quote, the mug shot to publish, the embarrassing video to air, and the easy question to ask:


Is America ready for a female president?

Should we bomb Iran?

Will K-Fed get custody of his kids?

All yes-or-no, let-me-tell-you-what-I-think speculation. No one asks the tough questions, like what gave us the right to cause the displacement of four-million-plus Iraqis, because tough questions can't be answered in the breaks between Levitra spots. But that's how the media stay in business. More important, it's how we like it, or it wouldn't be that way. And it's how the Bush administration, with O.J. running interference like the good blocking back he never was, gets away with its end-runs around the Constitution.