It may be only temporary, but the netroots and the civil liberties crowd won a big victory yesterday by derailing FISA. Senator Dodd spent about ten hours on the Senate floor talking against retroactive immunity. It's the first sign of a Congress willing to stand up to the Bush/Cheney fear-mongering steam roller.
You might think some of this would be fairly big news?
But not much sign of it in the paper this morning, and nothing I can see on the front page of the electronic NYT or WashPost. There are small inside items: in the “Washington” section of the Times, and the “national” section of the Post (A02 of the print edition, which is better than nothing), but clearly neither paper thinks it's that big a deal.
I meant to investigate your question sooner, but other things got in the way. In any event, I took your question and did what I could to answer it, by examining coverage on the 16th in relation to that on the 17th and 18th of December. I looked for one specific metric to tease out the coverage specific to the FISA filibuster, and while I certainly captured some noise in my analysis, I think overall the data is clear; I do hope you’ll find the results compelling. Let us know if you’d like a different analysis. Thanks!