It frustrates me deeply that Big Media has found yet another case of a missing ---presumably murdered--- expectant young mother to force down America's throat. Our culture of "news"-watchers gets swept up in irrelevance like the Laci Peterson Case and the Kobe Bryant Case and at least a half-dozen more at any given time ---and I cannot say why. It's obvious why Corporate News does it: because people take to it like they take to soap operas. It sells. And you know it must because, if it didn't, they wouldn't be running it.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is jack-off TV.
I would guess ---and that's all I'm going to do because I'd rather blow off some steam than go be Mr. Media Scholar right now--- that there isn't much more than 40 minutes out of every hour that is actual programming on any of the major cable news channels. And, of that, the ratio of actual factual reporting to fluff and puff can't be more than 1:5.
America could be better informed, but there's no money in it.
Let us, instead, watch the emotional carnage of people and families we will never personally know be strewn across our TVs. Let us ask the parents of a dead child what they are thinking or feeling. Let us speculate about the motivations of some sociopath and liar who has murdered his wife and unborn son and dumped them in the ocean. There is no relevance in any of this! You did not know them. You cannot help them. What they have done and are having done to them has no effect on you or anyone you know. So why do you insist on "sharing" in their grief and bringing it upon yourselves? What, are you fucking empaths?!
If I had known Lori Hacking, her death would be affecting me greatly. She appears to be a beautiful young woman whose future of motherhood and personal fulfillment now seems hopeless. But there is nothing I can do for her except to believe, in general, that she is entitled to dignity. As are her family and friends. The vultures who descend upon those people in their unimaginable grief and anxiety infuriate me. They are shit everlasting.
I refuse to watch garbage in my home. Insist upon as much for yourself. If Big Media wants to show its respect for you by providing some relevant news coverage and thoughtful analyses, that's great. That should be the ideal. But there is no surer way to get me to flip the channel than to show me goddamned Scott Peterson's mug and that creepy motif music that precedes his intrusion every time. It sickens me and I cannot wait for it to be done.