We Report, You Decide!

Terri Schiavo, Terri Schiavo, Terri Schiavo, then

Indonesia quake!
Chant's melody found at cat, che.

I think we have arrived at the eternal spiral. The horror vision an east-german woman described to me over 10 years ago is happening: 24 hour news is actually destroying our public consciousness and there's little we can do about it. Hannity drifts easily from the news of just another earthquake--that happened to kill at least a few hundred people as far as we know now--to TERRI, OMG, TERRI, to how the marxist liberals are out to brainwash apple-pie eatin' red-state guardsmen. But that's to be expected. CNN, the supposed "leehbruhls" in the 24-hour news scene, however, are playing right into this as well. True, they briefly interrupted programming, but from what I've seen, they went right back into appease-the-elusive-values-crowd mode. With few exceptions (ABC Nightline is running a special), the vast majority of reporting I see is the journalism equivalent of the SUV: cheap to manufacture coupled with trumped up demand, but in the end trash product. This is not what we had in mind back in the Clinton years glory days of technology.