Mike
The King-of-Nepal story was on US news and it certainly made the papers where the coverage is for the most part better in any case. That doesn't change the fact that there isn't much "in-depth" coverage on TV, aside occasionally from PBS, and that what one generally gets is a rehash of the same information one got only minutes ago with nothing changed. A totally dreary example of this is the closed-captioning for the deaf, which is apparently based on voice-recognition software, and often gets words and sentences so badly garbled that no one could decipher the underlying story. The story itself may be repeated again and again, but I have yet to see the closed-captioning corrected in a subsequent go-around. There also seems to be a certain contempt for giving the public the facts without some political spin. For that reason, one either has to choose an outlet that matches one's own spin, or listen to several in an attempt to cut through the buzz. We do get the BBC world service on PBS, by the way, and it is often better. At times, though, it tool seems to have a blinkered and parochial feel -- a bit obsessed with conditions in a former British colony that used to be more prosperous, or the results of an obviously rigged election there; and at those times, I can't escape the feeling that there's a bit of Schadenfreude at work. I'd also just as soon be spared the doings of Manchester United et al., but I switch channels when the baseball news comes on too, so perhaps that is a personal foible.
Lee