Even the most addicted news junkies — those who could not put down their newspapers, remote controls or computer meece, mouses, whatever, all last week during the Democratic National Convention non-coverage — learned little about what's really going on nowadays.

Where to begin?

Perhaps Iraq, where the American occupation forces have dwindling control of what seems to be an ever-expanding area of the country. Where was deeper and more comprehensive analysis of the 9/11 Commission's report released 10 days ago? What about discussion of the potential paperless-ballot debacle in November which will dwarf the 2000 hanging chad hijacking of the Florida vote?

Where at least are fact-checkers who call out the candidates, including President George W. Bush, on their campaign fabrications and obfuscations?

Chances are, even the most well-intentioned and well-informed know more about Michael Moore's antics at the convention, Teresa Heinz Kerry's telling a right-wing editorial writer to "shove it," the post-election polling "bounce" and other trivia than they do about serious issues.

For example, late last week a Google News search revealed almost 100 stories on how right-wing shrewball Ann Coulter was "censored" by USA Today which hired her to present a decidedly un-Democratic perspective from the political confab.

But USA Today — which, in an equally you-got-to-be-kidding move, has engaged Moore to comment on the Republican convention this month — dropped Coulter after she penned an unfunny screed from "the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston ...

"Democrats are constantly suing and slandering police as violent, fascist racists — with the exception of Boston's police, who'll be lauded as national heroes right up until the Democrats pack up and leave town on Friday, whereupon they'll revert to their natural state of being fascist, racist pigs," she rants, without citing one example of those suits and slanders.

(You can read the offending column, and the USA Today's editor's comments, at the conservative site http://www.humaneventsonline.com.)

While so much media attention was on Coulter, a stunning July 29 piece from that anti-American left-wing loony rag, the New England Journal Of Medicine, went completely unnoticed. It's about U.S. doctors' complicity in the torture of prisoners, at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, Guantanamo Bay and other detention centres.

"We know that medical personnel have failed to report to higher authorities wounds that were clearly caused by torture and that they have neglected to take steps to interrupt this torture," writes Dr. Robert Jay Lifton. "In addition, they have turned over prisoners' medical records to interrogators who could use them to exploit the prisoners' weaknesses or vulnerabilities."

Lifton, an expert on how doctors can become inured to atrocity, goes on to compare these violations of medical protocol to what happened among doctors in Nazi Germany, although he stops short of actually equating the two situations.

What called my attention to this story was Eric Alterman's media criticism blog at msnbc.msn.com, one of the many weblogs, on the left and the right, that I track each day. Because there are so many online watchers watching the mainstream watchers, the latter group — including yours truly — gets away with fewer inaccuracies.

Here in the Great White North, millions of citizens became familiar with blogging during this year's federal election campaign. South of the border, it seems they discovered them at the convention, where the cable TV biggies interviewed them in a sneering, patronizing way.

The bloggers, thrilled at any publicity in the very mainstream media they profess to despise, went off to write about who interviewed them for which paper or network, resulting in hundreds of Big Media reports on how bloggers were, as one longtime blogger put it, "cybertourists'' in politics-land.

"And as these convention-blogger stories piled up in the establishment press — there were several dozens of them by midweek — the real purpose of inviting bloggers to the convention suddenly became clear: They were there to be interviewed," observes Andrew Ferguson in a hilarious piece for theweeklystandard.com. "Huddled together in the Fleet Center, conveniently herded into their own seating section, thinking and tapping away, they served the larger goal of giving mainstream journalists a story."

Because, heaven knows, nothing else was going on at the convention, in the country or anywhere else in the world.

BLACK DAY: A humble proposal to USA Today and other media outlets who feel the need to dress up their coverage with conservative commentary from a woman: Forget Coulter.

Barbara Amiel, a.k.a. Lady Black, as in Mrs. Conrad Black, is available. Last week, she was dropped from yet another media outlet: Maclean's magazine, where she'd been a contributor for 27 years.

She's smarter than Coulter — and, despite her relative age, looks better in a miniskirt.

Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited.

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