Posted 4:28 PM by Floyd

Some big-time blogger said recently that regardless of your ideas on media bias, it is impossible for a person to be educated about world events by reading newspapers or watching TV. I found evidence of that today.

I was reading Tim Blair's blog and saw this posting:

JAKARTA UPDATE

The toll now stands at 13 dead and more than 100 injured. Nine New Zealanders and two Australians are among the wounded. Reports that an Australian was killed are now being denied by the government. A Dutch national is reported dead.

...

Crap, another Indonesia bombing. I went to the Mercury News website and saw ... nothing about Indonesia. The top story listed under "Breaking News" was "Firefighters struggle to contain wildfire near Morgan Hill - 03:32 PM PDT".

You would think that this bombing would be the most important news at this moment. More important than the top story on the website:

'O.C.' fits Fox tradition
It's a month before Labor Day, but the fall TV season is getting what in the restaurant business is called a "soft opening" this week.

But to be fair, I checked the National/World News page. Again, nothing about Indonesia. But that's okay, because that left plenty of space for defeatist propaganda:

Iraqis increasingly view U.S. troops as foreign occupiers
Nearly four months after the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime, the euphoria most Iraqis expressed over their leader's ouster largely has evaporated, replaced by growing resentment of the American presence.

In fact, because the person who updates the Merc website is HTML-illiterate, there was room for this defeatist propaganda to be posted twice.

(Note that the story that Tim linked to had a dateline of 18:00 on August 5th. That's about 2 a.m. this morning local time.)