War? What war?

Do we care about the war anymore? Judging from what's on the news (and news organizations are certainly well informed of what captures the attentions of audiences - i.e. advertisement viewers) we don't appear to be.

From Gary Kamiya on Salon.com:

As the Iraq nightmare deepens, Fox News and its cable competitors wallow in shark attacks and Natalee Holloway. If you don't cover a war, does it exist?

A pious young writer insisted that after 9/11, irony was dead; he received a large book contract to expand upon his paean to sincerity. Analysts from across the political spectrum argued that the terror attacks, like a vast memento mori, were a manifestation of death and evil that would forever change our superficial, sensation-addled culture. The astute New York Times columnist Frank Rich criticized the media for its petty pre-9/11 obsessions with such ephemera as shark attacks and tawdry murder cases. In the dark months after the attacks, the left and right agreed that the new era should, must, be one of dignity and gravitas. For conservatives, those qualities were in the service of anger; for liberals, of analysis -- but there was no disagreement about the need for transformation.

Today, the issue of how to comport ourselves in the wake of 9/11 is moot: It has been almost four years since the attacks, and most Americans -- without forgetting the tragedy or disrespecting the dead -- have gotten over it. But our current situation raises almost identical issues, of morality, personal conscience and the responsibility of the media.