It isn’t Alien vs. Predator, but it’s close. You thought that this summer’s blockbuster was Batman? Hancock? Kung Fu Panda? Nope. This summer the talking media heads have had little real work, so making it up as they go along seems the way to go.

We’ve seen befuddled AARP poster child John McCain’s repeated flip-flops, dumb remarks and fact-less attack ads go mostly unchecked. Why? Because reporters fear being bumped into steerage on the Straight Talk Express airplane, the very tactic BushCheneyRove and Co. used to cow the media to report the news their way in 2000 and 2004. When will they grow a spine? When the Democrats do?

Barack Obama is safely back home after looking very Presidential on his global coming out trip. Ironically he was goaded into the trip by McCain who was relegated to page nine below the fold all week and wondered whether announcing his Veep candidate would bring at least a half of a news cycle his way. Obama’s been taking serious meetings, looking for serious answers and asking for serious advice across the entire economic spectrum. So because he met with Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and got the assistance of Bush appointee and Wall Street darling Paul O’Neil, the media resorted to attacking him. They changed his “presumptive” nominee stature and labelled it “presumptuous.” Gosh, have we morphed back to 1980 and is that the same thing as calling a black man “uppity?”

But alas media craziness wasn’t restricted to the world of politics. Poor Madeleine McCann is still missing but this summer the UK media has its “The Replacement Killers” serial showing over and over again on a telly screen near you. It’s the utter Page 1 horror of a British couple murdered this week whilst on honeymoon on the Caribbean island nation of Antigua. It was by all accounts a senseless tragedy and yet one UK tabloid actually featured a sub-story headline yesterday proclaiming “the Antiguan murder rate to be worse than that of New York City’s.” (Some genius calculated the total number of murders vs. the island’s population of 80,000 which meant a high per capita rate). 19 versus several hundred, yeah, unsafe at any speed…

Of course the dignified and understated appearance of the Antiguan attaché to the UK Embassy was almost missed on BBC Radio 5 proclaiming his countrymen and women’s sincere and deepest sympathy to the families, asking for the help of Scotland Yard’s finest to assist in the investigation (something the McCann family would have liked to have seen) and stating, factually, that this was the first killing of a tourist on Antigua in 10-years (!) He also said the 19 murders (!) this year were the result of local disputes. Nevertheless the “fear, fear, fear, everyone be afraid” moniker will hang over an island that will be amongst the safest on the planet to visit this or any year in the near future precisely because of this tragedy and attention.

Forget that one family is faced with the unimaginable task of turning off their son’s life support system or the murdered bride who never saw her own wedding photos because she was on her dream honeymoon and due back earlier this week.

Instead how the UK press seems determined to further turn lives upside down and sell newspapers with rumour, innuendo and lurid headlines. It is sick and yet a further sign that the inmates are indeed running this asylum.

Last night I watched Angeline Jolie play the wife of murdered Wall Street Journal journalist Daniel Pearl in the film “A Mighty Heart.” In a climactic scene, her husband had just been beheaded by extremists and she was forced to exit the building via an underground garage because the lobby was over-run with “journalists” pushing microphones and cameras into her face to ask how she felt at that moment?

And the camera scrums have gotten so bad that the town fathers of my former hometown of Malibu, California asked Ken Starr (ironically the creator of scrums himself during the Monica Lewinsky blue dress stain saga a.k.a. the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton) for help. Mr. Starr is now the Chancellor of Pepperdine University and he is working with to draft an ordinance to help the towns “famous” residents claim back their lives from the mobile paparazzi and be allowed to live in relative peace and quiet.

Because of a blessed dearth of wi-fi access in Argyll and Bute County (The View Bar and Restaurant in Dunoon being a fine exception), each day on the Scottish shore begins with the purchase one of the “UK’s finest” newspapers. After my wife peels me off the ceiling for editorial decisions that make me think it can’t possibly get any worse, every day I see the profession sink further into the muck.

One of many telling examples… Qantas Air Lines suffered a mid-air fuselage tear last week resulting in a rapid decompression and emergency descent executed to perfection by the crew but leaving all passengers shaken, stirred and fine. The incident occurred shortly after take-off in China and the plane landed safely in Manila.

One UK paper had the incident occurring 20-minutes after take-off from Heathrow, that would be in London (!) Others speculated about age of aircraft and metal fatigue being an issue (be afraid and btw, if you fact check it, there have been two incidents in 20 years!) and yet another classically dug up the obscure Dustin Hoffman reference as the savant in “Rain Man” saying Qantas was the safest and only airline in the world. Raymond said “Qantas has never had an accident” and went on to wonder if a line from a 20-something year old movie script made this incident somehow impinge on their record because even though it did not crash it was still a serious accident!?!

Rare was the story where it seemed either a grown-up edited or a fact-checker remotely worried about accuracy as I bounced from the inane to the ridiculous without ever missing a single beat.

Thank goodness there are four days remaining on this holiday before I really have to worry about this stuff in earnest. I only hope the rest of this country and the USA is also vacationing and not paying too much attention to the craziness either. “Step away from the TV screen sir! Keep your hands where I can see them! Turn around slowly and drop the remote control on the floor!”

This weekend, I’ll be reporting from The Waverly, a re-commissioned replica of one of the world’s oldest steam paddle ships as we take the 3-hour tour from Dunoon to the Isle of Bute. If the first mate turns out to be named Gilligan or I see a professor, millionaire and wife, Mary-Anne or Ginger… we’ll pass.