Source : Toronto Star

Stand back, my head is about to explode. There's just too much incoming: too many media, too many messengers, and too many messages.

No wonder John Laschinger, campaign strategist for Belinda Stronach's run for the new Conservative party leadership, called Mary Lou Finlay, host of CBC Radio 's As It Happens, "Nancy" Tuesday night. If even the political spinmeisters are overwhelmed - and they only have to track the national arena - what about the rest of us?

Between the Conservative race and the American primaries, U.S. President George W. Bush's fantastical assertions in his State of the Union address, Conrad Black's falling fortunes, the endless war in Iraq, the mysterious RCMP raids in the British Columbia legislature (can anybody make sense of that story?), the sickening revelations about the racist OPP slurs made before Dudley George was gunned down at Ipperwash, the violence in Israel and its occupied territories, the Supreme Court battle over genetically modified canola, Sheila Copps' problems with the federal Liberal party, the energy woes in Ontario, Prime Minister Paul Martin's travels with a paper doll, Martha Stewart's legal trials and tribulations and who knows what else before I even finish this sentence ...

Makes a media critic understand why CNN's ratings double every time the network switches to Michael Jackson marathon coverage. It's a story even a child can handle.

And still, so many important issues and events are ignored while others are over-covered.

Some, of course, are a matter of resources. The media can't be expected to have the space and staff for everything happening everywhere.

Others are a product of bias and self-censorship. Not a media conspiracy per se, but the result of the conflict between coverage of a sensitive story and corporate interests.

Finally, some stories are ignored because, tragically, the world doesn't give a damn.

That makes the current genocide trial, now taking place in Tanzania, of Rwanda's Col. Theoneste Bagosora, who allegedly masterminded the slaughter of 800,000 in 1994, all the more poignant.

If the world paid attention to the massacre warnings back then, instead of gorging on the feud between Olympic skaters Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding, perhaps there would be no tribunal now.

Here is a tiny sample of the stories now going under-reported and even buried:

One of the biggest hunh? moments in Bush's mean-spirited speech Tuesday night was his reference to "dozens of weapons of mass destruction-related program activities and significant amounts of equipment that Iraq concealed from the United Nations."

That's a far cry from his and his administration's certitudes last year this time: "We know for a fact that there are weapons there."

So, if they can't find them now, how did they know "for a fact" then that they existed?

Most mainstream media have yet to hold the U.S. government to account for its lies.

Former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who was vilified for insisting that there was nothing to be found, gets little media attention. And military analyst/author Kenneth Pollack, who was all over the airwaves supporting the invasion, has now recanted in a piece "Spies, Lies, And Weapons: What Went Wrong " for The Atlantic (theatlantic.com) - but you wouldn't know it from the daily news.

For detailed lists of WMD lies, you have to go to Internet sites such as rightwinglies.com and bushwatch.org instead.

The World Social Forum 2004 in Bombay (wsfindia.org) has drawn an estimated 100,000 anti-globalization activists from around the world earlier this week - but the daily media acted as if it never happened.

And yet, this meeting dedicated to "people-centred and self-reliant progress" as well as "sustainable development, social and economic justice" is just as worthy of coverage as its antithesis, the World Economic Forum, the elite meet-eat-and-greet taking place in Davos, Switzerland right now.

And "they" say the media are liberal?

This month Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders) decried how the American media have "under-reported humanitarian stories" ranging from the conflicts in the Congo, Chad, Chechnya and Colombia to the starving millions in North Korea. The world is not watching, it seems.

Which makes me wonder if Marshall McLuhan didn't have it all wrong when he talked of a global village.

With apologies, the media only play the messengers when the message is profitable and reasonably palatable.

© The Toronto Star