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Anthony Downs' An Economic Theory of Democracy (1957) is among the most widely read and influential works in both economics and political science (a feat made more impressive by the fact that it contains no data, but I digress). For me, however, Downs' finest moment came later in his career when he defined the "Issue-Attention Cycle" in Western democracies. It remains the single best model for describing social and political reactions in the United States to a sudden, overwhelming crisis – famines, riots, disasters, outbreaks of disease, and so on. The Haitian earthquake and the Gulf oil spill were great examples. The 1980s Ethiopian famine was another.** And on this 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, I can't get Downs' theory out of my head.

The cycle has five stages.

1. The pre-crisis stage: All of the conditions exist for a crisis, but no one is interested. No attention is paid to the underlying, obvious, and persistent problems that will eventually become the crisis. In New Orleans, everything that led to the disaster was apparent to anyone who cared to look, although no one did. Staggeringly inept and corrupt local political leadership. Crumbling, inadequate infrastructure. High susceptibility to natural disasters. Stark racial divides and nearly city-wide grinding poverty. Poor to nonexistent Federal emergency preparedness.

2. Alarmed discovery: "Holy balls," says America, "New Orleans is an impoverished hellhole bitterly divided by race and drowning behind broken levees known to be inadequate for the past several decades! And the Federal government doesn't give a shit! No one is able to compensate for the appalling shortcomings of the local government!"

2a. Euphoric enthusiasm: "We can fix this! We're America! Honey, get my wallet. Let's send $25 to the Red Cross. Everyone get on board! Pull! Pull!" The problem, however, is understood as exogenous to society, thus the problem can be solved without any fundamental reordering (or even reappraisal) of society itself. No one asks sticky questions about entrenched racism or decrepit, disintegrating cities. That would be hard. The problem can – nay, must – be solved the same way Americans solve everything: throw some money at it and never think/speak of it again. As the saying goes, they will call you a hero if you feed the poor but a Communist if you ask why there are poor people who need someone to feed them.

3. Realizing the true costs: "What, you mean my $25 donation didn't fix everything in Haiti? It didn't feed sub-Saharan Africa? It didn't drain, dry, and repair New Orleans? WTF." At this point the public realizes that the problem runs much deeper and would require substantial resources and sacrifices to fix. When everyone realizes that $100 million in charitable donations and a few billion in international aid were barely enough to make a dent in the problems in Haiti or New Orleans or Banda Aceh or Bam, we are taken aback. The problem, we realize, stems from something that benefits vast portions of the population. Americans benefit from squalor in other countries. Suburbanites save money by abandoning cities and letting them rot. White people benefit from a black underclass. All Americans take advantage of desperate, exploitable Mexican labor. We like cheap oil made possible by unspeakable things done in oil-rich regions. So the real problem is…us.

4. Declining interest: People have one of three reactions to the realizations that accompany Step 3. They grow discouraged from the enormity and seemingly insolvable nature of the problem, they get bored, or they suppress it because thinking about the social changes that would be necessary to address the problem is frightening. So the number of news stories peters out, and 24 hour coverage becomes twice hourly coverage becomes twice daily coverage becomes something that isn't covered at all outside of specialty niche media.

5. The post-crisis stage: The name is misleading because nothing about the crisis has been resolved, but in the public mind it is history. We all did our part by pledging $25 to the Red Cross, and since the stories are disappearing from the TV and newspapers we can only assume that the problem has gone away (like that whole genocide thing in Darfur!) It will occasionally pop up again – the odd news report here or there, often on anniversaries – but for the most part we are through with it. More importantly, some other "new" issue is entering Stage 2…

As many of the Five Year Reflections will tell you about Katrina, a lot has changed. There is rebuilding. Some people have come back. The city carries on with its social events as usual. But in a more important way, nothing has changed. Many of the problems that caused the crisis, not to mention many lingering problems caused by the last crisis, persist. New Orleans is still poor and divided. Large portions of it still look like disaster areas five years after the fact. The local political leadership is corrupt and incompetent. The infrastructure remains poor in New Orleans, not to mention every other city in the country (Didn't a highway collapse in Minnesota or something? I don't remember.) However, lacking a public, media, or political class willing to do anything except slap bandages on gaping wounds before moving on to the next one it should come as no surprise to see retrospectives about New Orleans as the Brave Little Toaster, trying to get back on its feet while ultimately failing.

The current news items struggle mightily to remind us that problems still abound and the crisis isn't over; the problem is that for most Americans, no matter what evidence is placed before them, it is. We have not only moved on to new issues but also to our favorite way of obliterating social obligations to think or care about problems – blaming the victims and washing our hands of the issue.

**See Bosso, C. (1989). Setting the agenda: Mass media and the discovery of famine in Ethiopia. In Manipulating public opinion: Essays on public opinion as a dependent variable

I was stunned to see this press release from Fox News this morning. The key excerpt:

In light of the saturation coverage Fox News Network (FNN) has given the controversy over the proposed mosque at the former World Trade Center site, we feel it is fair to point out to our loyal viewers that 7% of News Corporation, the corporate parent of Fox, Fox News, and Fox Business Network, is owned by Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal through his Kingdom Holding Company. We have taken great pains to conceal this information over the years, referring to the Prince only as "A significant stockholder of the Company, who owns approximately 7% of the Company's Class B Common Stock" in our annual report to the SEC (page 44). But given our viewers' and on-air personalities' strong reactions to Islam, we feel compelled to note that News Corp is partially owned by a certified Muslim (see photo) who regularly patronizes mosques.

Additionally, News Corp has acquired a 10% stake in Rotana, a Saudi multimedia conglomerate that bills itself as "the Arab World's largest entertainment company." We have found this investment in a company that produces Arabic language movies and music that occasionally veer into anti-American tropes popular with Middle Eastern audiences to be quite rewarding.

Finally, in the interest of keeping our position as America's only source for Fair & Balanced^tm news, we would like our viewers to be aware of the $1,000,000 contribution News Corp recently made to the Republican Governors Association. These funds will help the RGA mount a consistent attack campaign against Democratic candidates and the incumbent President. FNN viewers should keep this information in mind when considering the network's claims of objectivity.

What refreshing honesty!

There are a lot of things I do not like but very few things about which I do not care in the least. The list is pretty short. Opera. Basketball. Country music. Fishing. Academic analysis of pop culture detritus (No, really, the world is aching to hear your Marxist-Feminist critique of Season 3 of According to Jim). Literature written before 1800. You might find these subjects very interesting and/or they may be very important. That's fine. I just don't care about them. At all. Hey, at least it's a short list and I can admit it.

I'm supposed to like everything about politics. Nothing in the universe of modern American politics is supposed to be uninteresting to someone in my line of work. But despite being a person whose personal Do Not Care list is pretty short and a Official Professional American Politics guy, the frequency with which I cannot bring myself to care about the ostensible headline stories on the news is starting to alarm me.

Take this "Ground Zero" Mosque thing. We are on day three of saturation cable TV and internet coverage. People, I swear on my eternal soul, this stack of Bibles, and the original Shroud of Turin: I could not give less of a shit about this "story" if it took place in the middle of the Country Music Awards. It doesn't even hold my interest long enough to listen to people venting steam about it and to process their opinions. I don't have a lot of respect for talking heads but I have to tip my hat to the people on cable TV for talking about this for three days straight. It can't be easy to do that much talking about something so mind-bogglingly irrelevant.

Many years ago Ted Carmines & James Stimson did some highly influential public opinion work categorizing different kinds of political issues. The simplest meaningful classification is not "social" vs. economic, but Easy vs. Hard issues. Easy issues are easy because it requires no information to have a quasi-meaningful opinion about it. Abortion is an easy issue. Yes, some people are well-versed in the legal and medical intricacies of abortion, but for most people it is a case of For It or Against It. I think it is immoral or I don't think it is immoral. And either way you can't prove me wrong. Gay marriage, right-to-die, mandatory English, and other "hot button" issues like that are good examples of Easy issues. Hard issues, conversely, require information to form a meaningful opinion. Tariffs or environmental regulations are hard issues. That's why we don't talk about them.

To put it mildly, we and our media are ass-over-teakettle in love with Easy issues because god knows the viewing public doesn't have information about anything and wouldn't usefully analyze it if they did. We love talking about stupid crap – Did Obama take a vacation at the wrong time? Should we build a mosque at Ground Zero? Should every candidate wear a flag pin on their lapel? Can the Ten Commandments be displayed in government buildings? – because these issues allow us simultaneously to talk out of our asses and offer an opinion that is as valid as any other. The mosque issue, for example, starts from the shared understanding that, yes, it is physically and legally possible for a group to purchase real estate and build a mosque just about anywhere. From there it essentially becomes "I think they should!" versus "Grr! Over my dead body!" And I would rather watch my rats bat a cardboard toilet paper tube around the cage than listen to, watch, or read that.

When nobody is right or wrong, what is the point of arguing? Who finds that interesting? To me, watching that is like watching a soccer game in which both goals were sealed off with bricks. When it's impossible to score you quickly realize that what is supposed to be an entertaining competition is just a bunch of idiots running around aimlessly.

I once spent four days at a conference in Branson, Missouri. It is far from the worst place on Earth – being safe and having indoor plumbing puts it ahead of a lot of the globe – but it most definitely earns its status as a punchline. It looks like a giant dragon that craps chain restaurants rampaged through the town, narrowly missing the countless ex-celebrity entertainers whose careers have gone to Missouri to die. Among the latter, famously, is 1980s comic sensation Yakov Smirnoff. He doesn't simply have regular gigs there. He has his own theater.

Yakov, for those who don't remember him, made a career out of a single running gag: he was That Soviet Comedian. Nearly every joke followed the now-infamous pattern of "In America you have _____, but in Soviet Russia we had ______!" The only deviation was for the purpose of reinforcing American stereotypes about the USSR, i.e. "First time I went to Disneyland I saw Space Mountain. Big building with no windows, everyone inside screaming. I said 'Hey, we have one of those in Moscow!'" Moderately amusing, until you hear the next 50 jokes and realize that they're identical. But I digress.

Obviously he camps out in Branson because kids who are 20 and under today were born after 1990 and thus the Soviet Union means about as much to them as the Holy Roman Empire. They can't tell you what "communism" is aside from its status as the Bad Guys in action or war movies. Stalin, Brezhnev, perestroika, SALT, the Domino Theory…these terms mean nothing to them. Since Smirnoff's comedy depends entirely on stuff like this, his career can only survive if he finds audiences that remember it. Enter Branson, where the average age of vacationers is in the high sixties. All of them are old enough to remember the Cold War, and some of them are senile enough to think it's still going on.

Fox News has been taking notes of Yakov's success and has adopted its own Branson Strategy with its latest balls-out effort to fabricate a scandal: the "New Black Panthers" voter intimidation "story." I mean, how the hell old do one's viewers have to be before the Black Panthers are a relevant cultural reference? Even the USSR was relevant until 1991. The Black Panthers haven't fueled the paranoid fears of white people since the early 70s at best. When even the commenters at well-known conservative websites don't buy this pathetic effort to make something where there is nothing – OMG, two black guys were standing outside a polling place! Why, no, we can't produce a voter who claims to have been "intimidated" out of voting by said Colored Men! – you know the goal isn't to convince viewers on the merits of the case. It's an unsophisticated attempt to remind viewers for whom that group is relevant, i.e. your grandparents and anyone else over 70, that intimidating, heavily armed, and hostile black people are coming to take away Our Way of Life.

Even by Fox's standards, this "story" is ridiculous. Apparently they feel that enough old white people are watching to make an appeal to 1968 nostalgia worthwhile. I can't wait to see what throwback they dredge up next to connect with their demographic. Baader-Meinhoff? The Symbionese Liberation Army?** Sacco and Vanzetti? The Sans-Culottes? Among its many other assets as a media outlet, it appears that News Corp is making a much appreciated effort take viewers on a trip down memory lane in its comical attempt to engineer public opinion.

**(Keep an eye out for my SLA musical, "From Tania to Cinque", which should be in theaters near you soon)

When Thomas Frank wrote in 2000 about the decline of labor reporting in American newspapers since the 1970s, he summed up the prevailing attitude by the late 1990s as "Unions are obsolete and strikes are sad." Strikes are no longer indicative of any underlying labor dispute, and certainly not extensions of any social or class conflicts (America having magically purged itself of the concept of class in the Reagan years). They are simply sad things that happen that make people fight and end with companies losing money and people losing jobs. The most damaging change, however, was the abandonment of the idea that the interests of management and labor are – or even could be – different. The 1990s revolution of Third Wave whiz-bang techno-capitalism, complete with video montages of the crumbling Berlin Wall and other tomahawk dunks of the free market, told us all that the interests of management and labor are one and the same. Strikes, unions, and class conflict are little more than personal vendettas and grudge matches played out by New Deal era relics who are too stupid and too stubborn to accept the inevitability of progress, refusing to accept the new, improved future in which the wage-grubber and CEO join hands and stride proudly onto the broad, sunlit uplands of post-regulation capitalism. Federal law prohibits the pre-1930s practice of setting up bogus "company unions" to derail organizing drives, but that is no longer relevant: the entire country is a company union now and we're all members.

In the interceding years, news coverage of labor issues has further degraded – which is to say that it is essentially nonexistent. The coverage of the pilots' strike at Spirit Airlines has abandoned any pretense of talking about labor-versus-management. Instead it focuses on passenger inconvenience, the quintessential "What's in it for me?" angle. Don't talk about the issues, just tell me if my flight has been canceled and how I can use my iPhone to get a refund.

No matter how many coats of sugar we apply over the issue with corporate propaganda and compliant, unquestioning journalism (due in no small part to the consolidation and successful union-busting in the print journalism industry since 1990) our society and economy really haven't changed that much. Workers and their employers are in a fundamentally adversarial relationship. The Company wants to get as much work out of you as possible at the lowest cost, and if they find a way to do your job more cheaply they will do it. You want to work as little and get paid as much as possible, and if a higher-paying job comes along you will take it. They are trying to fuck you, and it is in your interest to see to it that they do not succeed. That truth is fundamentally absent from labor journalism these days, which is unsurprising given the anti-union position of the newspaper industry and the generation after generation of brainless 23 year old journalism students with little practical skill aside from writing bland, inoffensive copy and sucking up to their corporate masters.

That said, the Spirit Airlines strike is an excellent example of how 21st Century strikes are born and play out. Management is emboldened by decades of compliant legislation and judicial willingness to strip away regulatory and labor protections. Labor is endlessly frustrated by the continued degradation of the things that have always defined "good jobs" in our society – benefits, pensions, reasonable hours, and good salary. The emboldened management acts like a swaggering caricature of John Wayne; the exasperated employees dig in their heels in an effort to salvage pride if not a better deal. Basically, picture two people holding a revolver to one another's head and saying "Don't push me, or I'll…"

The end result of this dispute is most likely going to be the collapse of Spirit as a viable airline, which feeds into the "strikes are sad" storyline. But the important questions go unasked. What kind of system produces management willing to burn their company to the ground rather than pay their pilots wages in line with other bargain basement airlines? What kind of system produces employees who would rather strike and possibly lose their jobs rather than continue to work under the existing conditions? Examining the underlying issues that produce this kamikaze approach to negotiation would require not only more effort than we are willing to devote to any issue but the admission that, believe it or not, labor and management are fundamentally in opposition – not to mention that they are engaged in a death struggle over a piece of a rapidly shrinking pie.

We can probably do better than "Unions are obsolete, strikes are sad." But even good labor reporting under the current economic circumstances would probably conclude that labor-management disputes are like two bald men fighting over a comb.

I had a rare and perhaps unprecedented experience on Monday morning at the tail end of a three-day visit to see my sister's family (including two nephews and a niece). I taught a two year old to describe The Scorpions' legendary hit "Rock You Like a Hurricane" as "epic butt rock."

Oh wait. I do crap like that all the time.

What I do not often do is watch any of The Today Show. You know, the Matt Lauer thing. They presented an investigative exposé on an issue that I must admit had not previously been salient to me: retailers re-selling underwear that has been returned (potentially used) by customers. While this seems pretty vile, it is not exactly America's most pressing problem – although I should try telling that to someone who gets crabs and enough yeast to open a Pinkberry from a pre-worn thong.

What struck me about this footage is not the shock value or relevance of the subject but the fact that a fluff factory like The Today Show actually did some pretty good investigative journalism here. They discussed, documented, confronted, and reported. If the lightweights on a morning show can do it, surely the hard news folks at the networks are capable of doing so as well.

It is often tempting to blame the lack of useful journalism among the mainstream media on a lack of brainpower or the failure of journalism schools to teach useful skills. But the problem is simply a lack of interest in doing real investigative reporting on political or economic issues. They'll do exposés on dirty thongs and answer the tough questions like "What is the best value in shampoos for normal to dry hair?" but they take a pass on the heavy lifting. An investigation of Victoria's Secret retail practices could easily be an investigation of the Dickensian third world sweatboxes at which their products are made. But it isn't. In-depth reports on toy fads or ridiculous moral panics (Rainbow parties! Back-masked Judas Priest lyrics! The piggy flu!) could easily be reports about the Air Force's reprehensible practice of using automated drones to hunt and kill Pakistani terrorists civilians. But it isn't.

I'm not sure which is more pathetic: a media that lacks the ability to do its job or one that lacks the interest. Yet ultimately viewers of The Today Show and anything else on TV bear responsibility. Hard news is inversely related to ratings, so we are locked in a downward spiral of more garbage fueling the desire to see more garbage.

Bill Kristol, defrocked New York Times columnist and mainstream media outcast who is still good enough for Murdoch, sayeth the following on something called Special Report with Bret Baier last week:

Look the data’s pretty clear in general that the offshore drilling of oil has become incredibly quite safe, not perfectly safe, but compared to other ways of getting energy, quite safe compared to the mining of coal for example, and very environmentally clean, except when there is a disaster like this spill, but Exxon Valdez was much bigger.

Read that five or six times. Those of you who do not jam knives into both eyes after the third reading should rejoin us for the next paragraph.

When the spill first happened I noted to anyone within earshot that the "drill, baby, drill" mouthbreathers were amusingly silent. I should have known better. That silence was actually golden and I would soon be yearning for it. And now I am. Kristol's breathtakingly stupid comment actually manages to make a slogan as asinine as "drill, baby, drill" sound like Olivier delivering the St. Crispin's Day speech from Henry V. Kristol, as usual, led the way for the right wing punditry. His comment was like the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics. Soon we would have:

First, God made idiots. That was for practice. When He was convinced that He achieved perfection, He made Fox News contributors.

I don't often do the Glenn Reynolds-style "Here's something someone else wrote – read the whole thing heh" posts but I've had the urge to reproduce a particular story in full. It will be difficult to explain the period between 9/12/2001 and the 2004 Election to future generations. It's sort of like the Red Scare or any other political-moral panic; you had to live through it to understand the extent to which the mass public bought into things that look patently stupid, even quaint, in hindsight.

The following is a Wall Street Journal editorial (from the board, not a single author) from 10/15/2001, right on the heels of one of the most fascinating news stories of our lifetime: the anthrax letter attacks on major media outlets and the offices of Pat Leahy and Tom Daschle. The fascinating thing, in my opinion, is the extent to which the incident dominated the news cycle for about 3 months and then completely disappeared. When it was finally resolved many years after the fact, not one media outlet or political figure offered a mea culpa for what they said and did during the initial hysteria. Consider the following (with a couple of my bolds; original here):

The usual government and media suspects are advising Americans not to "panic" amid the latest anthrax mailings, and of course that's right. The risks to any single person are small enough that it makes little sense to stockpile Cipro or buy a gas mask. But we hope all the cautionary words don't deflect attention from the genuinely scary prospect here: State sponsorship.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft says it is "premature" to declare any link among the three anthrax mailings to three different American states, or any one of them to the September 11 attacks. And, yes, it is possible that three copycats decided, independently, that now was the time to airmail the anthrax they had somehow stockpiled for just such a terror occasion.

But it's not very likely. The more rational hypothesis is that these were organized acts of terror, and that the anthrax wasn't produced in random basements.

Several circumstantial links to Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network are already known. Some of the World Trade Center hijackers, including suspected ringleader Mohamed Atta, visited an airfield near the site of the Boca Raton, Florida, anthrax mailings.

The anthrax package sent to a Microsoft office in Reno, Nevada, was mailed from Malaysia, another al Qaeda haunt. One of the September 11 hijackers, Khaled Almihdhar, visited Malaysia earlier this year, appearing in a surveillance tape with another suspected associate of bin Laden. The terrorist's followers also met in Kuala Lumpur, the Malaysian capital, in January 2000 as part of the plot to bomb the USS Cole in Yemen later the same year.

As for the package sent to NBC in New York, it was postmarked on September 18 from Trenton, New Jersey. That state, especially Jersey City, was the home of the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Center in 1993, a plot also linked to bin Laden associates.

More generally, as Dick Cheney said last Friday on PBS's "NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," "We know that [bin Laden] has over the years tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical weapons." Mr. Cheney added that the U.S. has obtained "copies of the manuals" that al Qaeda "actually used to train people" in how "to deploy and use these kinds of substances."

Which brings us to who might have supplied bin Laden's gang. The likeliest answer is some government. Growing your own anthrax isn't difficult but turning it into a useful weapon is. Terrorist bands have in the past tried to use anthrax as a weapon, notably in Japan, but failed. Liquid anthrax is useless for terror and keeping airborne anthrax spores in the proper form to kill isn't easy.

The U.S. cases have apparently all involved a powdered form of the disease. And this weekend's left-wing British Guardian newspaper cites intelligence sources as saying that, "Making powder needs repeated washings in huge centrifuges, followed by intensive drying, which requires sealed environments. The technology would cost millions." Bin Laden couldn't be doing all this in Afghan caves.

The leading supplier suspect has to be Iraq. Saddam Hussein used weapons-grade anthrax against his own Kurdish population with lousy results, before turning to more efficiently lethal chemical weapons. U.S. intelligence sources believe Saddam has stockpiled thousands of pounds of biological agents, including anthrax. U.S. officials let Saddam know during the Gulf War that if he used such agents against U.S. forces he would get a destructive response.

But that doesn't mean he, or his agents, might not want to unleash the weapon from a deniable distance, or via third parties. His anti-American animus hasn't lessened since his Gulf defeat. And Czech government sources have reported that Atta, the hijacking mastermind, met at least once with Iraqi diplomat Ahmad Samir Al-Ani in Prague.

We rehearse all this because the best defense against anthrax attacks isn't passing out Cipro to every American. It is to go on relentless offense against the terrorist sources. In this sense the anthrax scare has boomeranged on the terrorists. American public support for the bombing in Afghanistan has actually risen since the first anthrax reports.

Ending this war won't end terror, of course. Saddam or no, others will want to use anthrax or the like, and even after this week we still believe the greatest threat is nuclear terrorism. Americans are simply going to have to live from now on with a certain level of risk. The good news is that most Americans have been doing precisely that, with 110,000 showing up at Michigan Stadium as usual this autumn weekend.

New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani put it well the other day when he said that Americans should begin to behave the way the British did during the London blitz: Cope with the danger when it appears but otherwise go cheerfully about your lives. Meanwhile, the government has to do everything possible to destroy the anthrax threat at its state-sponsored source.

And that, son, was what 2001 and 2002 were like. This passed for an argument – and a good one, one that originated from and was persuasive at the highest levels of the media and government. Of course the editorial board was right about the "state sponsorship" part. The perpetrator was an old white American guy – not a Muslim terrorist, not an ex-KGB mercenary, not the Animal Liberation Front – working for the Department of Defense at Fort Detrick, where he had unrestricted access to the good shit. That the eventual outcome of this situation could have received so little attention in the media (and that the public could be so disinterested in demanding an explanation) is nothing short of amazing.

You'd think they would feel guilty enough to offer a "Whoops! Ha ha, we really screwed the family dog on that whole anthrax incident we used to amplify the Iraq War drumbeat. Turns out it was an American! Isn't that weird?" story. Instead they assumed we forgot about it and proceeded to do likewise.

Two weeks ago I saw this story on the front page of CNN's website and, for reasons that are not clear to me in hindsight, I wasted five minutes of my life reading it. It is typical human interest fare about the escalating violence in Mexico, with drug cartels shooting each other and innocent bystanders in droves while the police are (apparently) powerless to maintain order. The CNN piece focuses not on the social, economic, and political causes of the escalating violence but on a pair of poster children – two bright college-aged men gunned down in the crossfire.

I guess that's more appealing than talking about the PRI, NAFTA, and the voracious appetite of yuppies and their children for illegal drugs in the United States.

What strikes me about this story is…well, here are a few non-consecutive quotes. Let's see if anything looks odd.

"The Mexican government expresses its most deeply felt condolences to the families," the Interior Ministry said in a release on its Web page.

Separated in death, the two young men seemed inseparable in life. A Facebook page that demands justice for the slayings shows more than 30 photos of the young men and offers a snapshot of lives fully lived even at a tender age.

Mercado, an athlete, is shown working out on the rings at a gymnastics club and winning a medal and a trophy in track and field competition, where he was a pole-vaulter. Another photo shows him kneeling between two German shepherds. He's wearing a cap, blue jeans and a T-shirt and has a bemused look on his face.

Arredondo seemed more the social one, with photos of him with his arm around a young woman at what seems to be a party. Another photo shows him posing with a World Cup trophy display.

At least two Facebook pages are devoted to them: "Rest in Peace Jorge Antonio Mercado Alonso and Javier Francisco Arredondo" has more than 12,600 fans; "Javier Arredondo and Jorge Mercado – JUSTICIA! JUSTICE!" has more than 4,700 members.

Combined with the last 1/4 of the story, which consists of quoting posts on a Facebook wall, this story creates the distinct impression that the "reporter's" research consisted of looking at Facebook for a couple of minutes. He also thoughtfully visited a government website and cut-and-pasted a quote from a Minister. Nice work, Scoop McGee.

We are seeing more and more of this lamentable practice. Newspaper and TV news stories about things reporters found on Facebook. Stories in which the sources are Facebook status updates (or Twitter posts). References to Facebook to support grand generalizations about social phenomena. Mentions of how many fans such-and-such organization or politician have on Facebook. In fact, just watch the news on TV and see how long it takes before Facebook is mentioned. You need not set aside a lot of time for this experiment.

A stunning 89% of journalists told a GWU survey in January that they do story research on blogs, twitter, Facebook, and lesser social networking sites. The hottest job in the media industry is apparently "social media coordinator." Wolf Blitzer (and everyone else on CNN, possibly under threat of execution) ends every segment with a painfully awkward reminder to viewers to check out his Tweets on CNN.com. The mainstream media have an apparent love affair on their hands.

Is this reporting? Five French journalists holed up in a farmhouse in February without telephones or general internet access – their only means of communication were Twitter and Facebook. This stunt/experiment showed both the power of social networking doodads to keep them relatively well informed while also emphasizing the severe limitations. It underscores the point that social media are just another set of tools for communication. In the hands of a lazy industry, however, they're becoming more of a crutch than a tool. Developing ideas for new stories, doing research, getting quotes, and double-checking sources all mean the same thing now: check Twitter, dick around on Facebook for a while. Given that today's reporters are little more than stenographers – "Fact checking? What's that?" – this really is the logical next step. An industry this lazy can't help but take the path of least resistance, so we have a lot more quotes from Facebook walls to which we can look forward in the coming years.