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Once again we see that our mainstream media organizations are either too timid or too lazy to follow up on important stories that might demonstrate the incompetence (or worse) of the Bush administration.

From the Rittenhouse Review:

KEEPING ROY HALLUMS IN MIND

The Media Doesn’t Care. We Should.

Roy Hallums, the American civilian businessman abducted in Baghdad on November 1, 2004, is still missing.

A long time missing.

Never heard of him? I’m not surprised. Nor is Hallums’s family.

But maybe you have, since regular readers likely have taken notice of the days-in-captivity count I’ve been keeping in honor of Hallums at the top of the sidebar in the right-hand column of this blog for the last several months.

This tally, you may have surmised, is a deliberate recollection of the tragic score-keeping propagated by the likes of those much greater and more influential than I, throughout the Iranian hostage crisis (1979-1981), including Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel, journalists whose day-to-day persistence was so relentless it has been credited by some historians with helping to unseat then-incumbent U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

Remarkably, the Orange County Register today broke the mainstream media’s near silence on the Hallums story, offering readers “Devoted Daughter,” by Zaheera Wahid, an 1,100-word article about the tireless efforts of Hallums’s daughter, Carrie Hallums Cooper, joined by his other daughter, Amanda, and his ex-wife, Susan Hallums, to remember and gain the freedom of the family patriarch.

The Hallums family’s frustration with the country’s fleeting attention span, the readiness of the media and the public to issue a collective shrug of the shoulders, come through loudly and clearly, and with considerable justification. Wahid writes:

"For one day, Roy Hallums was front-page news. He led TV news broadcasts, and the world watched as the worn and haggard man pleaded for his life in a video released by Iraqi insurgents holding him hostage. His daughter, Carrie Cooper, and ex-wife, Susan Hallums, did the New York talk-show circuit, begging for help to find him. But just as quickly as Hallums became the day’s top story, his desperate situation was overshadowed by the next day’s news. And since Jan. 25, the day the video was released, no one has heard about Roy Hallums."
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