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They don't report. You don't have to decide.
"Despite the major environmental disaster unfolding in the Gulf and the attempted terror attack on New York's Times Square, President Obama spent his Saturday night laughing it up at the White House Correspondents Dinner," griped Sean Hannity of Fox News last week. His complaint is not inaccurate. But it's hardly the whole story. Also laughing it up at that dinner were many of the country's television news potentates, including some of Hannity's own colleagues. And unlike the president, they were caught napping on a night that could have been 9/11 redux.
Here's the time line from last Saturday. At 6:30 p.m. the abandoned Nissan Pathfinder was found smoking in Times Square. Relevant public officials marooned at the correspondents dinner in Washington quickly got word. Over the next hour and a half, several news organizations spread it as well while Times Square was evacuated. To clear the Broadway theater district at curtain time on Saturday night isn't like emptying a high school; it's a virtual military operation. By 8 p.m., the crossroads of the world looked like a ghost town, yet if you tuned in to a cable news network, it wasn't news. No one seemed to know or to care. On MSNBC, which I was watching, it didn't even merit a mention on a crawl.