How To Bury a News Story

It's a well-known political trick to release unpopular information late on a Friday, because newspaper reporters are headed home for the weekend, and Americans pay much less attention to the news on Saturdays, when the headline is likely to appear.

Election Day may fall on a Tuesday, but it is the mother of all Fridays.

So it's telling that the Bush Administration chose Election Day to announce it would auction off 50,000 acres of land for oil and gas development adjacent to three iconic national parks in Utah - Arches, Dinosaur and Canyonlands.

You didn't hear about it? No kidding. Probably, like everyone else in America, your attention was focused on the election results and the wall-to-wall coverage of the historic election of Barack Obama.

Luckily for the public, national parks officials have caused a stink about the lease, and the public fight between Interior Department agencies has brought more attention to the auction, as MSNBC reports.

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