If George Bush went on national TV tonight, said that he lied us into the Iraq war and then stuck a pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger, the media would whine about what took him so long to get around to it. That's the depth of their hatred for this administration.
And just where is it written in law that the media must be informed of everything above all else? Maybe the Whittington family asked the VP's office to wait a bit before releasing the information and starting the feeding frenzy, to give Mr. Whittington at least one night to rest a bit before being bombarded by the media vultures looking for anything they can use to destroy Dick Cheney. I were Cheney and had been asked that as a favor, I would have gone along in an instant, both out of a feeling that that was the least I owed the man after shooting him accidentally, and out of the knowledge that the media was going to going to rip me to shreds anyway no matter what I did.
I'm sorry, but this was a signficant news story. This isn't about laws or guidelines, but just applying some common sense - get the guy to the hospital first, notify his family, and then issue a press release. That would have ended that part of the story. Waiting 22 hours was stupid.