America: 'The Natalee Holloway case. A nation transfixed. Are the people of Aruba following as closely as Americans? And what's it like to be a reporter on the scene? Tonight, we go to Aruba to get the answers."
That was the voice of presenter Bill Hammer on a recent edition of CNN's Showbiz Tonight. He was referring to the coverage of the missing Alabama teenager Natalee Holloway on the Caribbean island of Aruba.
This story has dominated round-the-clock television news in the US throughout the summer. The cable news channels are so obsessed with her disappearance that the latest development - someone finding blonde hairs on a piece of thrown-away duct tape - was presented as breaking news, as was the subsequent finding that it had nothing to do with the missing woman.
"It has become a story that viewers can't seem to get enough of," trilled Hammer.
More likely American viewers are getting massive coverage of a story where nothing much is happening because of the huge resources - camera crews, satellite trucks and teams of star reporters and anchors - the media outlets have airlifted to the tiny Dutch island.
So it has come down to reporters interviewing reporters on a showbiz programme. There has, by contrast, been practically no coverage of missing New York state woman Connie Marie Hobbs (42), who was last seen by her family and friends on April 13th when she left Beacon for a doctor's appointment in Poughkeepsie. Hobbs is African- American while Holloway is white.
Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson suggested television networks focus only on missing persons who are white, female and young, such as Elizabeth Smart, Laci Peterson and runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks.
Brian Stetler of the TVNewser website agreed: "It's pretty much an accepted fact at this point that missing, young, blonde, usually Caucasian females will get the most media attention." With so much of their news budgets tied up in Aruba, the electronic media has eroded its own capacity to cover major world stories.
This is most notable in the case of the genocide in Darfur which the UN calls the "the worst humanitarian crisis on the earth", though as Nicholas Kristof pointed out in the New York Times, Diane Sawyer, co- anchor on ABC New's Prime- Time Live, travelled to Africa this year to interview Brad Pitt.
With the exception of some excellent reporting in the New York Times and the Washington Post from Darfur, African news is almost totally ignored by the US media. People looking for serious world news coverage tune in to BBC International wherever they can.
The networks did send crews to Darfur for one day last week, but that was because US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice went there and she is always accompanied by State Department reporters.
However, the self-obsessed coverage focused more on the roughing up of star journalists like Andrea Mitchell by Sudanese security men when Dr Rice visited the Sudanese president Omar al Bashir. To her credit Andrea Mitchell commented: "I can leave Sudan. The people of Darfur have no recourse."
Murder mysteries on tropical islands make for easier viewing than genocides, and on ABC's Nightline Ted Koppel had to implore viewers to "stay with us for a moment before you decide to turn away to something lighter" when he devoted some time to Darfur in November.
Carroll Bogert, associate director of Human Rights Watch and a former Newsweek correspondent, wrote a scathing article in the Los Angeles Times recently about Darfur coverage, asking, "So where are the journalists?" Kristof pointed out that the Tyndall Report, a website that monitors network news, found that the three big news networks, ABC, NBC and CBS, had only 26 minutes on the genocide last year.
On CNN, the cable network that boasts of its world coverage, Christiane Amanpour had to plead for an assignment in Darfur.
When there is no big story like the London bombings, which got wall-to-wall coverage here, the cable news programmes available in the US - namely Fox, MSNBC and CNN Domestic - fight for viewers with murder-mystery reporting and talk shows often featuring a type of sneering journalism that disrespects viewers and has also become a feature in recent years in some newspapers.
Another story that many media critics in the US feel is not getting a proper airing is alleged voting fraud in Ohio during the presidential election last November.
However, Harper's magazine has devoted a cover story in its current edition to an investigation of the controversy and especially the role of Ohio secretary of state Kenneth Blackwell, who was also co- chairman of the Ohio Bush re-election campaign.
Under the heading "None Dare Call It Stolen: Ohio, the election and America's servile press", the New York-based magazine criticises the scant media coverage of a six-week investigation by Congressional Democrats under John Conyers of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the judiciary committee which reviewed thousands of complaints of fraud, malfeasance and incompetence and cited "massive and unprecedented voter irregularities and anomalies".
The Democrats lost Ohio and John Kerry conceded the election but stories of voter fraud have raged like wildfire on the internet.
The White House press corps has for its part been so supine in its treatment of President Bush - whom 51 per cent of Americans now believed deceived them on the reasons for going to war in Iraq - that the New York Times singled out for editorial praise RTÉ reporter Carole Coleman when she did a feisty interview with Mr Bush last year.
The mood among the Washington journalists may be changing, however, as the scandal over the leak by top officials of a CIA operative's identity has led to the imprisonment of a reporter for refusing to reveal her sources.
Mr Bush seemed to show his displeasure at the newly assertive media when he flipped a finger at a group of reporters after a visit to Capitol Hill this week. Late-night comedian Jay Leno played a video tape of the president suddenly thrusting his right hand into the air and seeming to extend his middle finger. "That's the great thing about the second term," said Leno, "who cares?"