What do media talk about when there's no story?

Dick Cheney's unfortunate hunting accident has produced a feeding-frenzy in Big media. As highlighted here by Mary Katherine Ham, it appears that the story is mostly about, well...them and why they didn't get the scoop 5 minutes after it happened.

At Tapscott's Copy Desk, Mark Tapscott elaborates on a Jay Rosen theory on the Bush Administration's approach to the press. A little thing Jay called "Rollback." In a nutshell, the Bush administration is happy to bypass the big media structures. In the context of Hunter-gate it goes like this:

Cheney called the local newspaper because, he said, he was more confident the resulting story would be accurate, based on an eyewitness account to a reporter with a history of playing it straight with that eyewitness.

"I thought that made good sense because you can get as accurate a story as possible from somebody who knows and understands hunting," Cheney told Fox News' Brit Hume. "Then it would immediately go up to the wires and be posted on the Web site, which is the way it went out. I thought that was the right call. I still do."

Unless one is prepared to argue a conspiracy theory - Cheney used the delay between the accident and when the call was made to the newspaper to shape what was said to the reporter and to local law enforcement authorities - it is clear Cheney thought a local newspaper was more likely to report the accident accurately than a confrontational, liberally biased White House press corps.

Taking up the case of Big Media, though not directly,--it's more of an anti-everything Bush Administration broad-brush approach--is Arianna Huffington in yesterday's "Cheney Talks, the Cover up continues". Frankly though, I think she'd have been better off titling it something along the lines of, "I don't have a %^$#*(@ clue what I'm talking about." But that's just me.

One thing she had going for her, she didn't bury the lead...the premise of the post is right there in the title--there's a cover up! Only, I've read it a couple of times now and I'm still not exactly sure what the cover up is. Or what is being covered-up. Or why anything needs to be covered up.

Lots of bitching about what the VP did and didn't do, but no sense of why. Or how it was somehow an ethical and moral lapse along the lines of selling your mother for your next load of dope.

Memo to Arianna, and Lawrence O' Donnell and David Gregory, et al: There's no story here. And since there's no story, there's nothing to hide. And since there is nothing to hide, there is nothing being hidden (a point underscored today when Kennedy County officials said they will file no charges of any sort for anything).

Enough of the insanity.