Does it strike you as weird as it does me that the news media have gone wall-to-wall to give us every detail of the doings of the man who claims to be the person responsible for the death of JonBenet Ramsey ten years ago, including the complete menu of what he had to eat on his plane ride from Bangkok? Yet there has been almost nothing on kidnapped Fox News' reporter Steve Centanni and camera man Olaf Wiig who are still missing in Gaza.
Just when you think that the media couldn't be more shallow, just when you think their priorities couldn't be more perverse, they refuse to conform to your expectations and rush to fill the airwaves with the fantasies of some insignificant epicene psycho. Meanwhile, two men's lives hang in the balance in the Middle East, all but unnoticed by reporters and talking heads who can't be distracted from what they apparently believe to be the really important "breaking news".
Maybe this is unfair. The shows I saw did expend a lot of coverage on Samuel L. Jackson's vulgar dialogue in a movie, no doubt eminently forgettable, about snakes on an airplane. Perhaps that was seen as an important news story as well. Snakes and sickos on airplanes. Lord help us.
In 1961, when there were only three channels, FCC chairman Newton Minnow described television as a vast wasteland. It's added a lot of choices since then, but, notwithstanding the amazing number of options, seems only to have grown more arid.