Interesting media reactions.

Do you ever get the sense that the media as a whole is feeling it's way on a story? How big is this? What does it mean? Should we play it up or play it down?

I got the impression yesterday, that much of media was looking for signs from the other media about how big the Gifford's assassination attempt really was....

....and that the public's interest drove this story to get bigger and bigger.

These are impressions, but here goes:

I first got wind of this with a News Alert on KTVZ. I didn't know what to make of it at first; perhaps it was domestic violence. Perhaps it was a disgruntled employee.

What caught my attention next was the number of wounded. This was starting to look like a big deal.

Nothing on the USA Today for nearly an hour, but Huffington Post was on it; with what limited knowledge they had. And what limited knowledge they had was often mistaken; as in announcing that she had died.

But at some point, I went upstairs and turned on the cable news. Sure enough, MSNBC and CNN were all over it. Fox seemed strangely reticent -- with only one of their many news outlets covering it; and they had kind of strange 'terrorist' slant; as if this didn't have anything to do with American politics.

In fact, I got the impression throughout that Fox was reluctant to even follow the story, and was tiptoeing around many of the obvious ramifications. However, I can only watch so much Fox at a time, so I could be wrong about this.

MSNBC was the opposite, jumping to conclusions -- if you will -- that I think mostly turned out to be correct. They brought in the big guns -- The Oberdofferman -- interviewing Eugene Robinson, and so on.

I turned off the T.V. when they started to repeat themselves, and when I realized they were contradicting themselves.

But I came away with two impressions: one, that the Washington politicians were truly shocked and alarmed from both sides of the political spectrum. And, two, that the mall where the tragedy occurred looked liked "Anywhere USA." It could have been Bend -- it looked very very familiar..

Back to the internet, and KTVZ had a whole bunch of stories, so did Huff Post, and Salon and Slate were starting to enter the fray. The question of the 'political climate' started coming up, not only on the liberal sites, but also on most of the lamestream -- I'm sorry, mainstream media -- (who will ever take Sarah Palin seriously again, after this, except the lunatic fringe?)

Well -- the lunatic fringe is alive and well -- if you take the comments on KTVZ as any indication. Later in the day, most if not all the comments had disappeared, and I suspect that Barney chose the better part of valor and just stopped publishing them.

Over on the Big Picture blog, there was is a huge, nearly 300 comment reaction to -- what was to me, a common sense blog of, "can't we get along without violent talk?" The focus was on Sarah Palin and her irresponsible "crosshairs" map. What was interesting was that the moderator's announcement that he had gotten hundreds of inappropriate remarks that he didn't publish.

Finally, we come to the newspapers. The Bulletin has been a bit odd about this. I suspect they might have been just about the only newspaper in America that chose not to put the story on the front page. They had a bit of an excuse in Duck Mania, but -- really, isn't that rather provincial of us?

They have a small story in the front page today -- about heightened security for politicians, which seems a side issue to me.

I dare say, it seems like the more conservative the media, the more they downplayed it. The more liberal, the more they explored all the ramifications (because, frankly, I don't think it reflects well on the political rhetoric of the right.)

This is one of those times when the more mainstream media gave a better middle of the road indication of the importance of a story -- and they made it a very big story indeed.