The Wasteland media

Andis Kaulins from the law pundit blog compares the extensive media coverage to US President George Bush's inauguration with the near negligible attention given to the swearing-in of the European Commissio. He says that the Wasteland media has taken little notice of the ceremony today at the EU Court of Justice:

What a difference, and I am not sure it is a good one from the standpoint of the European Union or the major news media, if we look one day later after George Bush's inauguration, to the January 21, 2005 swearing-in ceremony of the
25-member EuropeanCommission by the EU Court ofJustice in Luxembourg.

We found the story at the Scotsman Online at EU High Court Swears in
European Commission. Nevertheless, the home page of the European Commission had nothing about the swearing-in ceremony, not even at its press release page, as
of 5 p.m. Brussels time on this Friday, the day of the ceremony.

We did however find a mention of it at: the Agenda page of VivianeReding, Member of the European Commission from Luxembourg and the Agenda page of JoeBorg, Member of the European Commission from Malta. EuropeanVoice.com has a rather confusing calendric entry regarding the ceremony. The online front page of the BBC has nothing about it and concentrates on music, murder and soccer. How low the BBC has sunk in recent years. CNN.com has an online front page filled with stupid garble about marginal events of little importance. An irrelevant photo captioned "Bush's father and Vice President Cheney give the president money for the collection plate" highlights the page and CNN then goes in one breath from that meaningless photo to Bush's very important inauguration message of US policy "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." What jerks the people at CNN are, treating the inauguration address and Bush and Chaney in church as vaudeville.There is no mention of the ceremony in Luxembourg.

Google News has nothing about the ceremony but a lot of muckraking. USNews.com has nothing about the EU on its front page. The International Herald Tribune features Middle East events of no long-term importance. The German FAZ.net has nothing about the EU and features yet more news about a corrupt German politician. So what is new? Even our favorite German newspaper DieWelt prefers a sensationalistic article about nuclear weapons problems to sober reporting of Bush's inaugural speech. No word on the EU. When T.S. Eliot wrote "The Wasteland" he was probably foreseeing modern mainstream media:

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? [with emphasis on the rubbish]
Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, [MSM - mainstream media - calls those broken images headline stories today] where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. "

In any case, the EU ceremony, on the world scene, is apparently a "no event".On the other hand (we will exclude the on-the-ball Scotsman), when one looks at what garbage the major news media generally carry as their main news features, we can thank the Lord for blogs and bloggers.