Bob Geiger at HuffingtonPost.com details just how awful, atrocious, inane, ghoulish, and unforgivably crass our "mainstream media" aka "corporate media" truly are.
WHY is the JONBENET RAMSEY story - a 12 years past unsolved murder case - more important than the DOZENS of Iraqi children who die every week as a result of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Don Rumsfeld's war of "flowers and cheers" in Iraq?
Oops! Discussing Iraqi children killed as a result of the American occupation/invasion of Iraq is a forbidden subject, so, let's try again:
"Why is the 12 years gone JonBenet Ramsey story MORE IMPORTANT than the corruption and fraud inherent in the 'PRIVATIZATION' of America's voting process, a process that is the very heart and soul of American democracy?" (We ARE 'fighting to spread democracy' aren't we?)
WHY is the Jon Benet Ramsey case MORE IMPORTANT than the ENRON extortion of California rate-payers, or the NO BID, NO OVERSIGHT, MASSIVE OVERBILLING contracts of HALLIBURTON corporation... a company that IS STILL PAYING DICK CHENEY compensation for past and future performance, compensation that GOES UP as Mr. Cheney directs BILLIONS of taxpayer dollars towards his former company??
WHY is the Jon Benet Ramsey case MORE IMPORTANT than how Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld PROMOTE THE TORTURE GENERALS, after those two authority figures of the US government had the United States military run KANGAROO COURTS to try, convict, and imprison FEMALE VOLUNTEER PRIVATES, accused of "abuse" for FOLLOWING ORDERS?
The answer to all the above and much more is that America's corporate media are now craven, paid professional liars. EVERY STATE that permits slot machines demands RIGOROUS INSPECTIONS of the computer-code that runs those machines, because the potential to insert a line or two of code which diverts even a small fraction of the waged money put through the machine ('skimming') is just so great.
YET, ON THE VOTING MACHINES that ultimately determine WHO CONTROLS THE MULTI-BILLION DOLLAR tax-and-spend power of the entire United States federal government, the media whores are AWOL, COMPLICIT, CRAVENLY DISINTERESTED in whether or not votes are being "skimmed," "flipped," diverted, or plain old obstructed.
What they, the corporate media news whores, ARE interested in selling America is SEX, CELEBRITY, VIOLENCE, and DEATH.
And that includes the dean of America's media yakkers, Larry King, who spent at least one entire show, and possibly more, discussing NOTHING BUT the Jon Benet case.
Sort of like the Roman gladiator games spectators cheering as lions devoured hapless, bound and tied Christian martyrs.
By talking about JonBenet's celebrity death, Larry King and the other media ho's DO NOT have to talk about the tens of millions of American children DEPRIVED of funding for pre-school, after-school, HEALTH CARE, and higher education by Republican budget slashings.
Well, DON HENLEY's landmark song (written when the media pursued stories that he was having an affair with an under-age-of-consent fan) is still the operative description of America's ghoulish media, enclosed one stanza (the rest at the cited site).
<< We got the bubble-headed-bleach-blonde who
Comes on at five
She can tell you bout the plane crash with a gleam
In her eye
Its interesting when people die-
Give us dirty laundry >>
http://www.lyricsfreak.com/d/don+henley/dirty+laundry_20042033.html
Media's Embarrassing Treatment of Ramsey Case Reaches Its Apex
Bob Geiger
08.28.2006
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-geiger/medias-embarrassing-trea_b_28204.html
There should be a lot of very red faces in newsrooms all over the United States right about now -- there should be, but I doubt there will be.
As many legal experts had theorized might happen, Boulder, Colorado prosecutors today dropped their case against John Mark Karr in the slaying of JonBenet Ramsey. It appears that a DNA sample taken from Karr simply does not match DNA from JonBenet Ramsey's body, making it likely that Karr was just an attention-seeker trying to get a quick 15 minutes of fame and dupe a scandal-hungry media into playing along.
Mission accomplished.
It remains unclear whether Karr will be released or extradited to California to face child pornography charges there.
Samples of Karr's DNA had been taken upon his arrival in Boulder on Thursday and they were tested at the Denver Police Department's crime lab over the weekend. Despite his insistence that he killed Ramsey -- and the 10-day media frenzy that has followed -- the tests have failed to put him at the scene of the crime and he may be released entirely by the end of the week.
What is amazing to me is the media circus that has followed this "case" for almost two weeks now without really a shred of proof that anything had truly developed in the 10-year-old mystery. And we're not just talking about an informational mention on page six or seven of the local newspaper, or a 90-second story buried in the second half of a one-hour newscast.
We're talking about hour upon hour of coverage, with some cable news networks devoting the entire hour of a 60-minute newscast to a developing story that could very well have turned out to be a lot of noise about nothing. We're talking about alleged journalists and editors whose judgment made them decide that John Mark Karr's plane ride from Thailand to the United States, where he sat, who he talked to, what he ate and even what procedure was used to allow him to use the bathroom was their very top story.
All of this without the most basic elements of proof that freshman journalism students taking Reporting 100 are taught to look for.
Unbelievable.
And this giant waste of time and resources, occurred at the expense of real news affecting real lives: A major crisis in the Middle East, a civil war in Iraq that's killing an average of 100 Iraqis a day and with our troops stuck smack-dab in the middle of it. We have a major portion of our population without the means to get a simple medical check-up because they have no health insurance, more Americans in poverty, a devastating budget deficit and hurricane season upon us with FEMA in no better shape than it was a year ago when it bungled Hurricane Katrina.
Oh, and those people whose lives were sidelined by Katrina a year ago, tomorrow? Most of them still haven't received any help.
But none of that -- not one bit of it -- was more important to the corporate media over the last 10 days than a specious confession, to a murder long ago and with very little in the way of proof to go along with it.
We should read, see and hear some major mea culpas across every spectrum of the American media for wasting everyone's time over the last two weeks and, if there's a price to pay for total journalistic incompetence, more than a few editors should be fired. That should happen -- but it won't.
The best we can hope for is that the media will take a good, long, collective look in the mirror and hopefully feel some shame over what buffoons they have been over this non-story and how much they have let the American people down.
I'm sure a few will feel that guilt -- at least until the next blonde chick goes missing in the Caribbean.
You can read more from Bob at BobGeiger.com.
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