Time and Newsweek: Totally, Out, Of, Touch

Time and Newsweek covers will both be about Vice President Cheney’s hunting accident, according to a Drudge Flash:

This just in… Both TIME and NEWSWEEK are planning high impact covers of Cheney for newsstands starting tomorrow, with each magazine rolling out top staff bylines and thousands of words on the hunting incident: TIME: With deep reporting by John Cloud, Mike Allen and Matthew Cooper/ Washington, Cathy Booth Thomas and Patricia Kilday Hart/ Austin, and Hilary Hylton. NEWSWEEK urgently brings in its big investigative guns: Evan Thomas, Michael Isikoff, Daniel Klaidman, Richard Wolffe, Holly Bailey, Mark Hosenball and Eleanor Clift in Washington and Carol Rust in Texas.

Good thing nothing, else, important, is happening in the rest of the world. (/sarcasm)
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UPDATE: The news priorities noted above go along way towards explaining the fact that while the US population increased by roughly 20% from 1988-2003, this is what has happened to the circulations of the three major newsweeklies:

The bleeding has continued. The source for the graph notes:

Along with those general circulation trends, newsstand sales continued to fall into 2004. Time was off by about 4% in the first half of 2004 compared to 2003, Newsweek slipped by about 7% over the same period and U.S. News saw a 4% newsstand decline.

And does anyone think that Newsweek’s circulation has gone up or recovered since the “Flush the Koran” hoax?

UPDATE 2: Michelle Malkin has more examples of “Cheney Derangement Syndrome,” plus a link to and excerpts of a a great Chris Wallace interview with former Senatory Alan Simpson of Wyoming about the absurdity of the media frenzy.

UPDATE 3: Brutally Honest also has a long list of “Never Mind” stories that are being downplayed in favor of all-Cheney, all-the-time.

UPDATE 4: Varifrank, who I hope is getting over his emergency-room incident and surviving the medication regimen, has an observation from when he was at the hospital: “NBC’s Today show was on the Emergency Room TV. Katie Couric was flogging the ‘Shotgun Cheney’ story and interviewing Mary Matalin when the entire room let out a groan. After Katie started with the ‘let me read to you a few reactions..’ line of questioning to Mary; a senior citizen threw a magazine across the room at the TV and shouted ‘isn’t it illegal to beat a dead horse’?” The incident Varifrank reports occured on Thursday, and shows that people were obviously tired of it even then.

UPDATE 5, Feb. 20: Other acrid comments from Macsmind and PunditGuy, plus a a great comment at Riehl World View: “Still better to hunt with Dick Cheney than ride in Ted Kennedy’s car.”
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May 17, 2005 — The Fall of the Weekly Mags, and Newsweek’s Double Standard