Charles Krauthammer today, on the infamous Cheney hunting accident:

If there was a sin against the public interest, it was in the desire to retain control over what was a still-chaotic situation. But it is a minor sin. There was no cover-up, nothing to cover up. There was no scandal. It hardly merited the quite overwrought charges of excessive secrecy, imperial arrogance, abuse of power and other choice selections from the lexicon of Nixoniana. Secrecy? This was hardly an affair of state. And it was hardly going to be kept secret.

Arrogance? The media laying these charges are the same media that just last week unilaterally decided that the public’s right to know did not extend to seeing cartoons that had aroused half the world, burned a small part of it and deeply affected the American national interest. Having arrogated to themselves the judgment of what a free people should be allowed to see regarding an issue that is literally burning, they then go ballistic over a few hours’ delay in revealing an accident with only the most trivial connection to the nation’s interest or purpose.

I hate to sound like a Cassandra, or a whiner, or a “eat-your-vegetables” media critic. But before last weekend, the world, including Washington, was beginning to pay attention to a grave, serious issue: A fundamental disagreement between the West and Muslim worlds over whether Islamic rules of blasphemy can be enforced, through violence, on non-Muslims in Denmark and elsewhere.

And now we’ve spent the past week on some (admittedly funny) birdshot jokes and the White House press corps screaming, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it anymore!” When they’re not dressing up in hunting orange.

Look, just because the Bush administration has a new embarrassing story, it doesn’t mean that last week’s big story went away. There are still deadly riots in Pakistan and Afghanistan, violence in Turkey and India, discussion of speech codes in the EU, and former President Clinton is declaring that their publication was “a mistake.” But that wasn’t the big topic in Washington this week, and it won’t be in the Sunday papers and on the Sunday shows. Nope, the hunting accident is the Big Story this week, and the Washington press corps cannot let anything as insignficant as a clash of civilizations get in the way of a story that makes the Vice President look reckless and dangerous. Besides, the riots are old news. We covered them last week.

I swear, sometimes I feel like my journalistic brethren have the attention span of an overcaffeinated ferret.

Cam: Is it just me, or are there some similarities between how the press is acting and how the lefty bloggers are acting regarding the cartoon controversy? I know, liberal bias, blah blah blah. But it’s like the press are looking for any story, no matter how minor, to distract from the fact that they’re acting as the gatekeepers of information. Too late for that fellas. We’ve got the internets now.