Our media roundtable looks back at a particularly grim week in which Jesse Jackson’s rather banal comment about Barack Obama received overwhelmingly more coverage than John McCain’s pronouncement that Social Security is an “absolute disgrace.” Media Matters columnist Eric Boehlert concludes that the discrepancy in coverage is further evidence that the Beltway press corps has become “borderline dysfunctional.” And it wasn’t only on McCain that the media failed to do its job. (Though they also gave him a free pass on his failure to attend a singe Senate Armed Service Committee hearing over the last two years. So much for his foreign policy credentials.)

Here to review the news—the good, the bad, and the ugly—from the past week are Jeff Cohen, Director of the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, Lionel, the author of Everyone’s Crazy Except You and Me and host of the Lionel Show on Air America, and Michelle Chen a freelance writer in NY. 

There was flagging coverage of John Ashcroft’s torture testimony. News that the British Parliament can no longer rely on assurances by the United States that it does not torture terrorism suspects is buried deep in the New York Times. The paper of record also published a weak front-page story on what Iraqis think about Barack Obama’s withdrawal strategy.

So where do we get our news in media wasteland? Jeff Cohen, says that most of the digging is being done by bloggers. At least they’re focusing on the biggest issues of the day, he says, policy issues. Michelle Chen’s story on women veterans of color in the current issue of ColorLines magazine is a good start. On GRITtv she discusses why her reporting reveals some deep fault lines within the anti-war movement itself. And if you want to get a sense of how the media will cover the Democratic convention in August, Glenn Greenwald’s recent piece at Salon on the corporate sponsorship of both party’s convetions may give you pause.

Every week on GRITtv we review what the media did right, what they did wrong, and what they shouldn’t have done at all. If you want to know what you’ve missed, stay tuned.