Levy disappearance: Is it news?

While other TV news programs were increasing their coverage of the Chandra Levy story — NBC’s Dateline has been devoting a segment to the case since Sunday — The CBS Evening News with Dan Rather is continuing to ignore it. The program’s producer, Jim Murphy, told Friday’s USA Today: “I will cover it when I feel there is real news there. … I don’t feel you have to cover it without evidence of a crime.” Anchor Dan Rather backed Murphy’s position, telling the newspaper, “I am very comfortable with what we’re doing. We are applying our standards, not passing judgment on anyone else’s.” Meanwhile veteran newsman Carl Gottlieb, deputy director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism and a former news director of the Fox TV station in Washington DC, said on PBS’s Newshour Thursday: “Every time we have one of these stories that we drag on forever, present something as news that isn’t really news, that really turns out to be a better yarn than it is informative, I think we alienate our viewers just a little more.”