Are Americans Really More Interested In A Bowling Presidential Candidate Than They Are About The Loss Of Civil Liberties?

I read the below piece on Daily Kos three days ago and have been meaning to re-print it here. I ask, in the spirit of the chicken/egg dilemma, which came first, the media dumming down the news because Americans are too stupid to understand anything with depth and importance, or are Americans made stupid because the media is too lazy and money driven to report anything with substance?

In the past two weeks, the following events transpired:

A Department of Justice memo, authored by John Yoo, was released which authorized torture and presidential lawbreaking;

It was revealed that the Bush administration declared the Fourth Amendment of the Bill of Rights to be inapplicable to "domestic military operations" within the U.S.;

The U.S. Attorney General appears to have fabricated a key event leading to the 9/11 attacks and made patently false statements about surveillance laws and related lawsuits;

Barack Obama went bowling in Pennsylvania and had a low score.

Here are the number of times, according to NEXIS, that various topics have been mentioned in the media over the past thirty days:

"Yoo and torture" - 102
"Mukasey and 9/11" -- 73
"Yoo and Fourth Amendment" -- 16
"Obama and bowling" -- 1,043
"Obama and Wright" -- More than 3,000 (too many to be counted)
"Obama and patriotism" - 1,607
"Clinton and Lewinsky" -- 1,079

More stories about a decade-old scandal and a presidential candidate's night at the bowling alley than about the White House declaring the Fourth Amendment null and void. Yup, that's about right.