"Oil-for-food" coverup.(The Last Word)

Here's a little pop quiz you can use on your neighbors or the water cooler gang at the office. First question: Have you seen the latest CSI: New York episode? Second question: Have you seen the latest PSI: New York episode? PSI: New York--what's that? We'll get back to that in just a moment. But first, for those fortunate enough not to own a television, CSI: NY is a CBS spin-off of CSI: Miami, which is a spin-off of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, one of those high-tech, grittily realistic, crime investigation dramas that use the latest techniques of forensic science to capture criminals. Seems almost every network has its own CSI-type crime solvers.

So, one might reasonably expect that the apparent public fascination with CSI-style dramas and their reality-show imitators would translate into sensational audience appeal for the real-life PSI. So, what is PSI? Never heard of it? Don't feel bad, tens of millions of your fellow Americans haven't heard of it either. PSI is the acronym for the U.S. Senate's Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has been digging into one of the biggest, most sensational crime sprees of the decade: the UN's infamously corrupt oil-for-food program in Iraq. It should be a Page One daily headliner. After all, PSI has everything going for it: mass murder, terrorism, torture, bribery, extortion, fraud, graft, coverup, and obstruction --on a colossal, global scale. This tops your wildest CSI dream episode: O.J. Simpson meets Scott Peterson, meets Enron, meets Osama bin Laden, meets The Sopranos.

But the kingpins of Big Media--who feed us endless blow-by-blow "news" accounts of the investigations of Martha Stewart, Kobe Bryant, and Scott Peterson--for some reason suffer from chronic attention deficit disorder when it comes to PSI's investigation of the international mafiosi operating out of the UN headquarters on New York's East River. Yes, there's a sporadic, 20-second news blip or an occasional headline on page 5 (or, more likely, page 25) about the latest revelations concerning the UN's gigantic oil-for-food scare, but nothing that comes close to competing with Martha or Kobe--or the latest racy episode of CSI.

If you were reading the Washington Post on November 16, for instance, you might be excused for missing the story on page A 17 entitled, "Iraq Gained $21 Billion Illicitly, Senate Panel Says." This was the Post's idea of "coverage" of the huge news coming out of the PSI's hearings on November 15. In case you missed the story altogether--which is entirely possible, since the Post's coverage of the subject is typical of Big Media's overall performance on the issue ...