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I visited Yahoo.com and came across the following Associated Press headline: "JonBenet suspect heads to U.S. in style."
The article described the lovely meal of champagne, pate and prawns - topped off with a piece of fine Valrhona chocolate cake - that John Mark Karr, suspected of murdering JonBenet Ramsey, ate off a starched, white tablecloth as he sat in business class on his flight from Bangkok to Los Angeles. And of course, he had to look his best: He wore a nice red shirt with a black tie.
What is this, "Lifestyles of the Sick and Heinous?" Is "child killer chic" the latest rage this season?
But that's beside the issue.
The headline of an opinion piece by Jeff Cohen, founder of the organization Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, summed it up: "TV News Vultures Circling JonBenet's Corpse - Again."
This brings to mind veteran journalist Pete Hamill's book, "News Is a Verb," wherein he described the rise of personality-driven journalism such as non-stop coverage of the OJ Simpson trial and JonBenet Ramsey. OJ and JonBenet have given way to runaway brides, Michael Jackson's trial and the spawn of Brangelina.
Hamill gave a good reason why so many of our news media had turned away from news about things that actually mattered and instead reported on such personality-based drivel.
"Licensed by publishers, MBAs have been granted positions of power in many newsrooms," he wrote. "These men and women, who have never been reporters, depend upon polling and focus groups to shape the news package."
He further wrote, "When the newspaper is filled with stupid stories about celebrities at the expense of hard news, the reader feels patronized."
Monday evening, on CNN's Nancy Grave show, one newsworthy bit of information about Karr's Hollywood-royalty comeback did come up: Karr's business-class ticket, along with those of various law enforcement officials who accompanied him, cost taxpayers $15,000, at $3,000 per ticket. But $15,000 of the American people's money paying for fine chocolate cake and champagne for a suspected murderer was just about all that I would call substantial.
Terrible things happen every day. As of Aug. 15, since fighting between Israel and Hezbollah began, 966 people - young and old, soldier and civilian, Jew, Christian and Muslim - had died in Israel and Lebanon. So why do we get so upset about one 6-year-old beauty queen? That's not to say that JonBenet's death wasn't a tragedy, but there are hundreds of dead children in Lebanon who warrant far more attention.
Meanwhile, President Bush, defending his warrantless wiretaps Aug. 18, rationalized the program by saying that opponents "simply do not understand the nature of the world in which we live … This country of ours is at war."
While it made the news, Bush's resorting to the typical refuge of a tyrant to excuse draconian behavior by playing the we're-at-war card took second place to JonBenet.
One of the taglines for the movie "American Dreamz" was "Imagine a country where more people vote for a pop idol than for their next president."
Sound like anyone we know?
Any functioning democracy depends on a well-informed populace. And when I say "informed," I mean knowledgeable about important issues, not the name that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie want to give their baby or Paramount Studios' recent dropping of Tom Cruise from its payroll.
Ballantine Books published "News Is a Verb" in 1998, when many Ball State University students were children. But the situation that Hamill described remains reality today.
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