JonBenét and our pathetic press

I want to recommend two articles today from the Smirking Chimp website that refer to the recent JonBenét feeding frenzy by the media. The first is entitled "Sick puppy meets media beast" and it gets started this way:

John Mark Karr is one sick puppy - a school teacher who fantasized that he'd engaged in consensual sex so passionately with six-year-old JonBenet Ramsey that he accidentally killed her.

And television news in our country is one ravenous beast - abandoning any notion of journalism, proportion or decency to again prey upon JonBenet's corpse for ratings and profit.

God only knows what combination of hurt and mental illness went into producing the sick puppy. On the other hand, there's no mystery about what created the media beast: corrupt government policies combined with corporate greed.

Make no mistake: The media beast is every bit as compulsive and out of control as Karr, who may yet end up behind bars for child pornography. But the beast is free to maul again and again.

For 10 days, TV news has fixated on this imposter-culprit as if he were a world-historical figure - like Nelson Mandela emerging from prison, only bigger. TV tracked Karr's travels across the globe, telling us what he ate for dinner, analyzing his attire.

To extend Karr's allotted 15-minutes of fame into a 10-day ordeal, TV news ignored important stories of war, environmental degradation, corruption, citizen activism. Instead, TV viewers were offered hundreds of hours of single-minded examination and debate on one burning question: did Karr do it? The inquiry was relentless and aired all sides.

If only we'd had such in-depth, full-spectrum debate when the Bush team was dragging our country into war based on pretense.

If only, indeed.

And now I want to quote from an article entitled "JonBenét died - and Bush lied?" by Thom Hartmann:

I was on the air doing my radio program two weeks ago when the story came down the wire that the killer of JonBenét Ramsey had been captured in Thailand just hours earlier. I opened the microphone and said words to the effect of, "Today there must be something really awful going down for the Republicans. Maybe Rove really will be indicted. Maybe Cheney. Maybe some terrible revelation about Bush. And if there isn't, today will be the day they'll toss out the unsavory stories - like gutting an environmental law or wiping out pension plans - that they don't want covered."

Apparently it was worse than I'd imagined.

That same morning - just hours after the JonBenét information hit the press and just after I got off the air - it was revealed that US District Court Judge Anna Diggs Taylor had ruled that George W. Bush and now-CIA Director Michael Hayden had committed multiple High Crimes, Misdemeanors, and felonies, both criminal and constitutional. If her ruling stands, Bush and Hayden could go to prison.

Yeah, like that would ever really happen.

Hartmann believes the Ramsey story and the recent terror alert and other news "coincidences" have been engineered by the Republicans:

So we have Republicans who have admitted spying illegally. Who brag about it. And who have evidently - according to Tom Ridge - played the media like a violin for years. Could it be that the Karr/Ramsey case is another Soviet-style manipulation of the media?

Or is that too paranoid to contemplate?

Tragically, there are virtually no investigative reporters left in America, and the few who are still working find incredible roadblocks - and over the past year the threat of imprisonment - when looking into the workings of the Bush administration's intelligence services.

I don't think it's paranoid in the least. I think it's the way these people operate and anyone who thinks otherwise is sadly naive.