Obliged To Look The Other Way

“So another argument was heard last week: that Mr. Bush, having gone into Iraq on bad intelligence about weapons that never existed, could be erring now in the other direction — deliberately whistling past the warheads in Pyongyang, in hopes that the problem will solve itself.”

–From NYT Week In Review story (Don’t Shoot. We’re Not Ready), one of the few mainstream articles to appear lately on the Korea threat to carry even a smallish pic of Kim Jong Il.

Unless a major story involves a topic that is quite abstract, you can usually count on that event to generate quite a flow of news images.  So in cases when it doesn’t, it’s instructive to ask why.

Consider North Korea, for example. Here they are on the verge of testing an intercontinental ballistic missile with a potential range of 3,500 miles, and its practically a non-event.  Can you imagine the coverage if it were Iran about to test? instead, this story has remained low on the radar, failing to draw the scrutiny — and, the prime visual space — of major news magazines and newspapers.

Perhaps the only publication willing to push the story recently was “The Week.” The rest of the MSM seemed to oblige the Administration with the low profile.

(illustration: Darren Gygi.  The Week.  June 30, 2006.  Cover)