I’m reading the Good Doctor’s “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ‘72″ and I’ve been interested by his repeated use of the term “linear media.” Thompson was renowned for his style — Gonzo journalism, which (like blogging) emphasized the views, opinions, and experiences of the journalist. It was first person and honestly subjective.

The linear media were everyone else covering the ‘72 presidential campaign - the three networks, newspapers, wire services, and magazines. They went everywhere together, wrote the same stories, stayed in the same hotels, had the same opinions, and were all chummy with the politicians they covered. Obviously, when compared with Thompson, their pedestrian journalism often missed the point and played into the hands of the pols they covered.

While the Terri Schiavo case is certainly not unique in its sensationalism, it strikes me how much the mainstream media is in fact linear. For days and weeks all we have heard about is Terri Schiavo, though the coverage is occasionally interrupted by reports on Jacko’s trial and amber alerts. Iraq isn’t being covered. The truth about Social Security privatization isn’t being covered. Honestly I’m not sure if I can tell you what has happened in the world over the last five days, but I can tell you every decision, law, and protest that has happened in Florida and DC.

The linear media is defined by their willingness to subsume news to hysteria. I wish I could have lived in days when the media and public didn’t care that FDR lied about his physical health or when Woodward and Bernstein were actually investigating illegal actions by the executive branch. If I was alive in the days when the media respected the importance of news stories, not ratings, I could look back admiringly and long for those golden years. Instead I’m left with an idea, a romanticism of journalism that maybe never existed exactly how I wish.

The world doesn’t work the way the linear media portrays it in the news. The story of the week is never all there is, and yet while the media covers Schiavo the rest of the world passes us by. Last week the Republicans in Congress cut support for veterans and reduced assistance for the American small farmer. While the linear media covers false moralization of intensely personal and individual matters, the GOP is landing body blows on the little guy, the regular American. And we’re lucky this week, because the Schiavo case is in fact morally challenging and politically difficult. I say we’re lucky because I believe this case matters infinitely more to our nation than Michael Jackson, Scott Peterson, or Robert Blake. In that sense the coverage is important, but when one side of the Schiavo case is so profoundly in the wrong why must the coverage drown out all else that is happening in our nation and the world?

I don’t know why Hunter S. Thompson killed himself last month. I feel a deep loss that I can’t hear his opinion on all that is going on in our nation today, inevitably with an article nominally about gambling on the new baseball season that evolves into crystal analysis of DeLay and Frist’s antics over the last couple of weeks. But whatever reasons led the Good Doctor to take his own life, I can’t help but think the current political commentary in the linear didn’t give him a desire to keep watching it.

Philo