Via Politico's Ben Smith, I see that the the five fastest-falling Google queries of the year include three politicians: John McCain (#1), Barack Obama (#4), and Sarah Palin (#5).

What's striking about that list is that, despite the public's rapidly decreasing interest in those political figures, they continue to enjoy massive media attention.

Now, the media pretty much have to cover Barack Obama. He's the most powerful person in the world.

But John McCain is not president, he chairs no Senate committees, he represents two percent of the U.S. population, he lacks a strong constituency even among his own party -- a party that is pretty widely disliked and has taken a thumpin' in two straight elections. He is not playing a central, or even peripheral role in the health care debate. And yet he's on television all the time. As Steve Benen notes, McCain is about to make his 16th Sunday show appearance of the year. Sixteen.

And Sarah Palin just got two weeks of media coverage so extensive you would have thought her book launch was a Beatles reunion tour. But she's very unpopular.

I'm not a fan of letting public interest drive news decisions, but that's the only real justification for covering McCain and Palin this much -- one is a minority-party Senator kicking around the periphery of most of the year's key public policy debates, and the other is a former half-term governor of one of the nation's least-populous states. So the only real reason to cover them is that people are interested. But these new Google stats suggest the public is rapidly losing interest in McCain and Palin -- yet the media still keeps treating them like political superstars.