Richard Cranium at All-Spin Zone is publicizing the story of Latoyia Figueroa, a pregnant Philadelphia woman who went missing eight days ago. Richard’s campaign, as I understand it, has two goals: first, and most importantly, he wants her story to get out into the press so that she will be found; second, and almost as importantly, he wants to criticize the MSM for providing wall-to-wall coverage of missing people when they are white, and ignoring them when they are not.

Thanks to Richard’s posts and fundraising efforts, Left Blogistan is moving behind the story, and it looks like the MSM is beginning to follow suit. And that is a good thing, because it increases the chances that she will be found.

However, I don’t believe that encouraging the MSM to write even more missing persons stories will help move it towards more responsible journalism. After all, would we be happy if CNN and FOX suddenly went 24/7 on Latoyia instead of Natalie, and continued to sugarcoat the disaster in Iraq?

If one of our goals is indeed to encourage media responsibility, we might think about a few acts of censorship that occurred yesterday. The July 27 edition of Doonesbury contained a reference to “Turd Blossom” — President Bush’s affectionate, and apt, nickname for Karl Rove. In the last frame of the strip, the President says “Hey Turd Blossom! Get in here!”

According to the AP, about a dozen U.S. newspapers “objected to Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s ‘Doonesbury’ comic strips, and some either pulled or edited them.”

The managing editor of The Kansas City Star — which removed the strip and ran an older one in its place — had this to say:

The hypocrisy in this move should be immediately clear to most Americans. Beyond the fact that intelligent readers should be able to differentiate between the provenance of a comic strip and an editorial, Garry Trudeau did not make up the name “Turd Blossom.” The term comes directly from the President of the United States, who promised during the 2000 campaign that he would “restore honor and dignity to the White House.”

So, when an editor of an American paper decides that the term “Turd Blossom” is “in bad taste,” he is providing a direct critique of President Bush’s lapsed moral values.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that the Bush administration has demonstrated that its high-minded talk about moral values is a load of bunk, that its holier-than-thou public facade camouflages rank hypocrisy.

But it is an important reminder that what the MSM has ignored in its focus on Natalee Holloway is the fact that honor and dignity have been missing from The White House for the last five years. And that is another story worth covering.

UPDATE: Since writing this post, I have reconsidered my argument about promoting the Latoyia Figueroa case. My other posts on the topic can be found here and here.

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