One wishes Rather had not skipped the other salient points about the CBS poll. By 57 to 37 percent, Americans surveyed didn't want any more prison abuse pictures to be released. And 49 percent said the media have spent too much time on the prison abuse story, compared to a mere 6 percent who think it's been undercovered. Not only were those poll results not aired, they don't seem to have caused anyone to put the brakes on the careening Abu Ghraib Express.

 When it came time to sum up the week, the Sunday morning TV shows were predictably harping on prison abuse and mostly left the Berg story out. The weekly news magazines glossed over Berg in varying degrees. U.S. News & World Report's cover read "Inside the Iraq Prison Scandal. The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib. Why the System Broke. The Psychology of Torture." Inside the magazine carried 10 pages of Abu Ghraib coverage but gave just about three-fourths of a page to the Berg killing. Time carried a Bush/Iraq cover with no mention of Berg. It carried five different Abu Ghraib articles and one sidebar on Berg.

 Newsweek was the worst of all. The cover carried the hot authors of the evangelical "Left Behind" novel series on the cover, with a top-of-cover plug for "The Truth About (U.S.) Torture." Inside the magazine, there was no Berg article. None. They carried an almost two-page sidebar on Iraqi insurgents, profiling young Mohammed, who sought to kill American infidels "living on bread and Pepsi," but no Berg article. In a political analysis, Howard Fineman mentioned in passing, "Officials pointed out to the beheading of Nick Berg in Iraq as proof that the Middle East needs to be cleansed of the likes of Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda." Berg's life was reduced to a Bush strategy of prison-abuse damage control to "declare American righteousness."

 The Berg story was not a slam-dunk pro-Bush angle, as anyone who saw Berg's Bush-blaming father could attest. But it did show that somewhere in the world, there is someone morally lower than the Americans. Apparently that's a truth that our news media somehow cannot stomach.