Opinion: Perfect Storm for a Media Circus- Ferguson, Missouri

As it happens, the stars are in perfect alignment for the events in Ferguson, Missouri, to become a media event on the scale of the coverage of the course of a major hurricane hitting the United States.

The basic story is one we all know so well by now: some white cop somewhere shoots and kills some young black man and the circumstances are a matter of intense debate.

As the story unfolds, with charges and countercharges, more and more people weigh in, there are protest marches and more scuffles with the police.

The big new added ingredient in Ferguson is the fruition of ANOTHER story that has mostly been getting the attention of Libertarian groups and much ballyhooed on such places as Facebook: How the U.S. government has taken all sorts of excess military equipment and gear made for Afghanistan, and, instead of selling it or scrapping it ( or, say, sending a lot of it to the Kurds to fight the terrorists on their doorstep) has made it available for free to all these police departments " in the boonies."

Suddenly, small police departments in Minnesota, Kansas and Oregon have all these assault weapons and armored vehicles and whatever else they can get their hands on...the result is like something out of a comedy fantasy movie: instead of "Let's Be Cops", it is " Let's Be Assault Forces."

So in Ferguson when there were protests, "community policing" was done like a full scale military operation.

The media has gotten its teeth into this story now, and, as is their wont, will never let get now until every bit of sensation can be wrung out of it. The media get to be players in the conflict too, relating how they have been targeted by police with tear gas, etc.

As I said, in a case like this, can Al Sharpton be far behind? In Missouri we also early on had Sen. Claire McCaskill, now safe in her Senate seat ( after a real squeaker of an election) who can say whatever she wants now and go public in a big way.

The media has bent the story to its own needs: it threw a temper tantrum of immense proportions when the name of the cop who did the shooting was not immediately released, for instance.

As always happens, the police hit back, in this case with surveillance videos of the young Michael Brown ( hitherto shown in photos only as picture of youthful cherubic innocence) and his girl companion robbing a convenience store.

I was waiting at the dental clinic Friday afternoon and they had CNN on the waiting room wall screen. CNN showed the footage of Brown, looking like nothing but a swaggering, smug young thug pushing what seemed to be the Asian proprietor out of the way as he stole the $48 worth of cigars.

They repeated this video clip over and over again endlessly...

The ruckus continues now and pundits have not weighed in really yet with all kinds of "deeper" analyses about what has happened in Ferguson. But you can't feel that, with sports in a lull and no real hurricanes to report on, the media is not falling all over itself to report on, and participate in, the events in Ferguson.