Why?
First of all, how did the story of that pathologically-lying, now non-abducted college girl become national news? For what possible reason did every cable news network carry that story from start to finish? It's an embarrassment. The instant they showed security camera footage of her pacing in the lobby of her building before she took her long weekend ("in a marsh," for Christ's sake!), you just had to know that the whole thing was crap. She was off for some jungle love or something, but it was all her doing.

Second, when are the networks going to come out and admit that this was a bullshit story from day one and that they were wrong to have carried it? The closest thing to an ombudsman that any of them have ---and it's really not one--- is Fox's News Watch, a program where a panel of five journalists (which includes about one and a half liberals) analyze the week's media coverage and declare this or that to be right or wrong. Otherwise, I hardly expect any of the networks to cop to the shoddiness of their logic in covering this story.

Is it that they want to repeat the genuinely shocking and bizarre outcome of the Elizabeth Smart thing and gravitate to those kinds of stories? If so, they can surprise me and choose a real abduction story where the victim falls outside the usual demographic orbit. I wasn't really joking when I made that observation before: the cable news networks' obsession with irrelevant and insignificant stories of crimes against theretofore unknown victims is telling only in its focus on attractive white people, preferably females.

There's really no other explanation but that the networks believe (because focus groups tell them to) that such stories are interesting and titillating in a ratings-positive way. And, because the dissemination of news on television is a for-profit enterprise that is entertainment-based, the only way to really get the information you need is to go online or to turn to trusted magazines or papers.

But this Laci-Scotty-Martha-Jacko-Bullshit-all-the-time stuff on the TV has got to go.