As I wrote yesterday, Fast and Furious should have been uppermost in the minds of every reporter at the president’s press conference — yet most of the journalists in the room gave BHO a bye. Today on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, columnist Mark Steyn memorably took the mainstream media to task for its lack of interest in the scandal, which has resulted in the murder of at least 200 people in Mexico and at least 11 violent crimes in the United States:

“Now real Mexicans are dead,” [Steyn said]. “Does the president of the United States, does his attorney general, does CNN, does The New York Times, does NPR — do they not care about dead Mexicans?

“I mean, forget the United States Border Patrol guys that were killed with these ‘Fast & Furious’ guns. Real-live, or previously live, citizens of third world countries — the kind of people that NPR, The New York Times claim to love — are dead because of this.”

“Why isn’t that a national scandal?” he pleaded. “This is absolutely a — Iran-Contra didn’t rack up that kind of body count. Watergate didn’t rack up a body count. Sarah Palin’s daughter’s boyfriend’s mother, or whatever stupid story they were chasing around Wasilla for months, that didn’t rack up a body count. There were hundreds of dead Mexicans from a gun running program run by the United States.”

The rate of revelation regarding Fast and Furious has been steady (and steadily serious), but Steyn’s right: That’s no thanks to either the Justice Department, which has resisted Congressional inquiry into the matter, or the mainstream media, which has studiously avoided the subject with just a few exceptions. Must be because MSM news outlets are so “reasonable.” What we know about F&F, then, is a testament to the conviction and persistence of Congressional lead investigators Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), to the conservative media (even though the DOJ has consistently refused document requests from our sister site Townhall.com, as well as CNSNews.com and other conservative sites) and to CBS reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Watching this news unfold has at times seemed like a horror show — when I first heard the death count in Mexico, for example — and at other times has seemed like a hopeful reminder that “the truth will out.” Stories like this just can’t lie dormant forever — and, in the end, the MSM ignores the news at its own peril. As more and more media consumers recognize which news outlets deliver relevant information and which news outlets don’t, those that ignore truly newsworthy events or feign objectivity as a thin disguise for agenda advancement will become less and less, well, mainstream.