Bombs vs Bombshells Revisited

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.

[snip]

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. CBS' update of the Smith story was given another minute and fifty-eight seconds of precious air time -- two seconds more than last time -- while its coverage of Iraq lasted two minutes and ten seconds. Aha, you may say, that's 12 seconds more than they gave Anna Nicole, and a 31 second increase from the last time the two stories went head-to-head. True, but Monday was also the third anniversary of Bush's "Mission Accomplished" speech -- a fairly significant news peg, wouldn't you say?

While it may be hard to make compelling TV out of a written Supreme Court ruling, that didn't stop CBS from trying. They rolled out lots of cleavage-heavy file footage of Anna Nicole (in all her many hair styles and dress sizes) and plenty of droll commentary from Schieffer, whose intro slyly ruminated on the mysterious nature of love, and referenced the songs of Rogers and Hammerstein and Ira Gershwin:

Schieffer: Who knows what draws two people together, that look across a crowded room on some enchanted evening, or the way you wear your hat and dance till 3. And, of course, there's that other little motivator, money. But what was it in the case of Anna Nicole Smith and the old fellow she married? The question went all the way to the Supreme Court. And today love found a way.

The venerable Schieffer's eyes all-but-twinkled when he said "old fellow she married". He also put a button on the story with a Friar's Club-worthy zinger. Following up Wyatt Andrews' report that the Marshall family has vowed to spend millions fighting to keep Anna Nicole from getting any money, Schieffer ended the segment by saying, "I'll guarantee you the lawyers love her." Rim-shot! Witty and snarky stuff, for sure -- but couldn't they have had their fun with the Smith story in, say, 30 seconds and given the rest of the time over to Iraq?

As it was, CBS' Iraq coverage was a mixed bag. Schieffer took a fairly biting look at the "Mission Accomplished' anniversary, recalling "what many thought at the time was one of the cleverest photo-ops ever," with Bush "decked out in a dashing flight suit... under a banner that said 'Mission Accomplished.' But it turned out not to be."

"With the president's approval rating now down to another new low, 33 percent," said Schieffer, "I take it this is one anniversary the White House did not want to talk about today."

He then tossed to CBS White House correspondent Jim Axelrod, who also focused on the poll numbers, citing the 44 percent drop over the last three years in the number of Americans that approve of the way Bush is handling Iraq, falling from 74 % to just 30%.

Telling numbers, to be sure. But there were some even more telling numbers that weren't included anywhere in the CBS story -- namely the 2,266 American soldiers killed, the 16,927 American soldiers wounded, and the $241 billion spent on the war since Bush landed on the USS Lincoln and announced that "major combat operations have ended." Seems like they could have fit those in somewhere. Over at NBC, Brian Williams was even more cavalier: "By the way, the U.S. death toll in the war is nearing 2,400." By the way??? (Williams was also behind the death toll curve, which now stands at 2,405.)

The CBS report could have also mentioned the bleak results of a new poll of Iraqis [via Juan Cole and Think Progress] that found that 76 percent rate their security situation as "poor", 62 percent say the country is more divided than in the past, 68 percent say corruption is getting worse. And -- by the way -- just one percent named U.S. and coalition forces when asked whom they trusted to protect them.

On the plus side, the CBS segment included a stand up from Allen Pizzey in Baghdad that highlighted the disconnect between the president's upbeat assertion that Monday marked "a turning point for the citizens of Iraq" and the facts on the ground, where efforts to form a national unity government continue to falter and sectarian killings continue to push the country toward civil war. "People here are very much looking to protect themselves," reported Pizzey, "they're not thinking in terms of nation right now... We're finding that people are fleeing neighborhoods where they're in the minority and, in fact, you're getting people coalescing along ethnic lines. And they're not looking to the state for protection but to ethnically based militias."

No zinger from Schieffer after that grim update. None was needed.

All in all, not a bad report. But given the comparative importance of the stories, doesn't the Bomb vs Bombshells balance (2:10 to 1:58) still seem seriously out of whack?