There’s an article on the front webpage of the Globe and Mail that the US dept. of justice has once again denied the only person charged in the September 11th attacks some of the constitutional rights that apply to his pretrial process. That’s significant – the Department is being very open about their refusal, claiming that constitutional rights don’t apply to people being held as prisoners of war outside of the US (the defendant isn’t, but some of the other people involved are). It should be a civil rights battle royale and very newsworthy. And if you look for it in, for example, the Washington Post, it’s there, but it’s practically buried. It’s nowhere at all on the cover of USA Today.

That’s been the case with plenty of important stories that should be of interest to US citizens over the last year or two. They either aren’t reported on, or are done discreetly enough that for most people they might as well not exist. Stuff like the US bugging the embassies of other “allied” countries during the United Nations debate on invading Iraq, or the US adminastration forging documents about Iraqi purchase of WMD components, or civilian deaths in the war, or many others I am too tired to remember. A few of these issues come with reporters or politician dogged enough to pursue them and eventually blow up into minor scandals, but it’s rare and unless it happens they mostly dissapear. And they can vanish that way because the US media is pretty much complicit with the government – conciously or unconciously, intentionally or not.

During the war, on-line readership of news outlets like the BBC, the CBC and some independant papers, particulary British, went way up. Not mostly because of local readership but because Americans were outsourcing their news habits. That was bound to be a short-lived trend because most readers want their local news as well as decent national and international coverage, and if they live in Wyoming they can’t get that from The Guardian.

Maybe what is needed is a easy online summary available each day, outlining what American-related stories aren’t getting covered in America. A sort of appendix to the daily read. By itself it would be useful, if it was accurate in finding the stories that aren’t getting covered it might also be an interesting index of what the US government specifically thinks is dangerous information for Americans. Maybe it could rely on Google’s automated news parsing and some region-specific math to generate the list independant of any humans with their political biases. I’d read that.