Tsunami, Iraq, Schiavo by the numbers

Currency Exchange on the Life Markets for April 2005:

• 1 dead Terri Schiavo: 15,000 mentions on TV


• 300,000 dead Tsunami victims (2 weeks following): 9,000 mentions on TV


• 100,000+ dead Iraq War victims (during 2 weeks of Schiavo coverage) 2,900 mentions on TV

1 brain-dead white American woman = 450,000 South Asians or 500,000 Iraqis.

And I have news for our fundamentalist Christian friends. Hitler, long before he was in a position to do "mercy killing," was pandering to Christian conservatives in Germany and promising to clean up their decadent, Jew-controlled media, and vowing military retribution against everyone who had attacked the homeland. Mussolini was off distracting the populace with imperialist ventures in Ethiopia, where he was spreading the values of the West and toppling the dictator Hailie Selassie.

Salon.com News | A tale told by an idiot:

What is telling about the excessive coverage is how right-wing activists, with heavy-hitter help from Washington, were able to lead the press around, as if on a leash, for nearly two weeks as they pumped up what had been a long-simmering (seven years) family legal dispute and turned it into the most-covered story since a tsunami in Asia three months ago left approximately 300,000 people dead or missing. In the past two weeks the cable outlets and networks have mentioned 'Schiavo' more than 15,000 times. By comparison, during the two weeks following the Asian humanitarian crisis, those same outlets mentioned 'tsunami' approximately 9,000 times, according to TVEyes, the digital monitoring service. (As for television's long-forgotten Iraq war, it garnered just 2,900 TV mentions over the two weeks that Schiavo mania ran rampant.)