" It was fitting that reporters were in danger of outnumbering pro-life supporters outside Terri Schiavo's hospice in Pinellas Park, Fla., on Thursday morning." LINK

Has there ever been a set of protesters so small, so out of proportion, so outnumbered by the press, for a story that had supposedly set off a "furious debate" nationwide?

In the past two weeks the cable outlets and networks have mentioned "Schiavo" more than 15,000 times. By comparison, during the two weeks following the Asian humanitarian crisis, those same outlets mentioned "tsunami" approximately 9,000 times, according to TVEyes, the digital monitoring service. (As for television's long-forgotten Iraq war, it garnered just 2,900 TV mentions over the two weeks that Schiavo mania ran rampant.)

The Schiavo coverage was reminiscent of what followed the death last year of former President Ronald Reagan, when CNN and other news outlets simply handed over their airtime to conservatives for days at a time.