Last week was another week of "Scarborough Country" fixated on a few violent crimes and missing person cases. Swamping out the air-time of all other topics were the familiar cases of Holloway and Olivia Newton-John's missing boyfriend, a news staple for cable news shows. To supplement the dominance of this category were a few new cases with nothing much in common other than the fact that the victims were young, white females. For the sake of thoroughness, they included: murdered teen Taylor Behl, missing CA woman Christie Wilson, and a mother attacked for her unborn baby (story covered under the headline: "Stolen baby horror").

Virtually half of the show's useful airtime for the week (49%, see pie chart) was dedicated to this handful of cases. As if to reinforce its self-irrelevance and incongruence, the MSM reported that almost all measures of violent crime are down significantly since a decade ago. I wonder if the same can be said for the proportion of media coverage dedicated to violent crime. A good portion of the reporting on the Holloway case wasn't even original "Scarborough Country" reporting. Much of the content was simply a re-run of the coverage from "The Abrams Report", another MSNBC primetime show. In my short time making recorded observations of "Scarborough Country" I've noticed that the regurgitating of content from another affiliated source seems to be commonplace. A lot of reporting on "Scarborough Country" comes from other programs like "Dateline", "Abrams Report", or local news stations (which are referenced as "NBC affiliates"). In fairness, Joe Scarborough had the week off, and perhaps most of the show's staff also had the week off. With nobody around to do any actual journalism, I can only speculate that the show's producers decided to re-run the same tired old stories, bring on the same tired guests, and rehash the same tired discussions that yield nothing new and thus by definition are not news.

Another astounding aspect of the show's topics were the perfect shutouts scored against some of the biggest stories. There was zero time dedicated to the Supreme Court, the war in Iraq, and the brewing Plame-gate scandal. In a week that saw an up-coming Iraqi referendum on a newly drafted constitution, continued wrangling over the Supreme Court nomination, and impending indictments against White House staffers, there was not a word or whisper of these stories in "Scarborough Country". But there was time, on three consecutive nights, to discuss the salacious details of an NFL player's boat party. There was also time to have guests come on the show to discuss if the paparazzi are harassing celebrities.

The week's only (faint) glimmer of substantive and meaningful journalism was some continued coverage of the FEMA/Katrina recovery and a four-minute segment on the state of the armed forces with guest retired general McCaffrey. McCaffrey, as always, had some interesting thoughts and insights into the military's current recruitment deficit, Iraq war veteran health benefits and the future make-up of the armed forces. Details are shown in the table below.