Dan Rather is upset about the amount of media coverage that Ronald Reagan’s death has been receiving:

“Even though everybody is respectful and wants to pay homage to the president, life does go on,” Mr. Rather told the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“There is other news, like the reality of Iraq,” said the “CBS Evening News” anchor. “It got very short shrift this weekend.”

Perhaps Rather thinks that the week of Reagan coverage has distracted the media from its real job: undermining President Bush in Iraq with months of wall-to-wall Abu Ghraib coverage.

The public, though, seems to disagree with Rather:

At Yahoo! searches for Reagan spiked 5,314% Saturday, the day he died, compared with the daily average. Since then, the portal has seen huge numbers of searches for information about Reagan’s funeral, scheduled for Friday, and his presidential library in Simi Valley, Calif. Lycos said that Reagan-related searches between Monday and Wednesday were 12 times what they were in the seven days before his death.

[...]

At America Online, more than 70% of 258,995 people — six times more than usual for an AOL political poll — who voted over the course of just 21 hours determined that Reagan was “one of the best” presidents ever.