The Downing Street Memo controversy has provoked an essay earlier this week by Jay Rosen of PressThink.

It in turn led to a Salon column by Ariana Huffington. An excerpt:

I was thinking a lot over the weekend about the news and about how the news becomes the news, and then I read Jay Rosen's brilliant take on the Downing Street memo coverage. Rosen elaborates on Josh Marshall's assertion that "news stories have a 24-hour audition on the news stage, and if they don't catch fire in that 24 hours, there's no second chance." Rosen's theory is that blogs have become the news cycle's appeals court, and that the Downing Street memo story is still alive because it won on appeal. And thank God.

But unlike a traditional court, the Blog Circuit Court of Appeals lacks an enforcement arm. The only way its decisions can be enforced is by constant reiteration of the decisions.

Which brings me back to this weekend. If you were to get your news only from television, you'd think the top issue facing our country right now was an 18-year-old girl named Natalee Holloway who went missing in Aruba. Every time one of these stories comes up -- like, say, the Michael Jackson trial -- when it's finally over I think, what a relief, now we can get back to real news. But we never do. When one of these big-league nonstories ends, they just call up a new one from the minors ... and off they go with another round of breathless reporting. Anything to not have to actually report actual news.