The wildfires that raged in Southern California last week featured numerous tales of bravery, tragedy, and plenty of missing pets. But one reason the disaster became such a major story was that journalists couldn’t resist raising the comparison—fair or not—with the 2005 fiasco on the Gulf Coast.
For years, journalists struggled to report on the activities the private security firms in Iraq, companies who functioned in some ways as private armies. But last week, when the story of one such company moved from the streets of Baghdad to the hearing rooms on Capitol Hill, the media shed more light on the mystery.
The arrest of O.J. Simpson not only conjured up memories of the famous murder trial of a dozen years ago, it also recalled the media feeding frenzy that surrounded that trial. And as was the case back in 1995, the story last week was a made-for-TV drama.
The Simpson arrest and Hillary Clinton’s health care proposal proved irresistible fodder for the talk show universe last week. Plus, why some newsmakers—like Dan Rather and Alan Greenspan—got more attention on talk shows than in the general news coverage.