Priorities

As Gordon Brown replaced Tony Blair as British prime minister, the country was plunged into a high state of alert due to investigations into unsuccessful terror plots. On Friday, two potential car bombs were defused near popular London nightspots. Saturday, a burning SUV crashes into a Glasgow, Scotland airport terminal, resulting in its closing. Five suspects have been arrested so far, according to authorities. They also believe that Al-Qaeda may have been behind the failed plot. (The United States, for its part, responded by beefing up security at airports. They did not, however, raise the threat level, citing the lack of any credible intelligence leading to an attack.)

The cable news channels covered this story in its usual wall-to-wall fashion, with correspondents on the scene, talking heads in the studio, and the same damn footage of the burning SUV over and over. Was the media kicked out of the airport after it happened?

And what was going on back in the United States? Let's see . . . Paris Hilton is now a free woman, and people were waiting in line to be the first on their block to get the new Apple iPhone (so they could later sell it on eBay). The pricey, glorified computer with a two-year commitment to AT&T will likely be obsolete in a few months, when a new one takes its place.

On CNN's "Reliable Sources", host Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post devoted a few minutes of the program to Hilton's post-jail appearance on "Larry King Live" with two media critics.
Then CNN broke in with news of Glasgow police performing a controlled explosion of a car outside a hospital where an alleged terror suspect was being treated. Afterwards, Kurtz and his guests discussed news coverage of the British terror plot.

That spur-of-the-moment discussion bumped a taped interview with Tina Brown, who wrote a book about Princess Diana on the anniversary of her death. Maybe CNN did us a favor?

Priorities. What would we do without them?