The Media's Prurient Interest

I returned home late last evening and queued up my computer for the last of my late night routines, checking my email and the latest news. Like most of the rest of you I was saddened if not shocked to see in the flickering half-light of my monitor the top news story on cnn.com - "6 Killed on Northern Illinois Campus". To the right of the grim accompanying picture were a short series of bulleted headlines, all conveying the sort of serious, need-to-know information one would expect from one of the world's top media outlets. 'Brother Shotguns Sister' read one, apparently showing that neither tact nor a rough knowledge of the workings of the English language are pre-requisites for a job writing copy for cnn.com. 'Armed Man Terrorizes K-Mart Customers' read another particularly salient headline, alerting me to a news story of vivid and serious importance which will no doubt have a meaningful and long term impact on my life.

Here's an idea, free for the good people in the media who have done so much to enhance the quality and well-being of my life and the lives of the people around me. No need to worry about constantly having to update your website every time news happens, let alone pay someone to do some sort of an in-depth expose of an actual issue. Just change your website to one huge, constantly blinking headline blaring 'CRAZY PERSON DOES HORRIBLE THING!!!!' Make sure to include exactly that number of exclamation points.

I don't mean to simply critique the state of the press in this country; doing so is redundant and simple, nuking fish in a bucket as it where. I have come to accept that the major media outlets provide coverage which is shallow and vapid, focused on the crass and violent to the virtual exclusion of everything else. But there is something so nauseatingly grotesque, so fundamentally immoral about the media's use of each new school shooting that it needs to be set apart from the usual swill we are daily force-fed. Turn on any of the 24-hour news channels at any point in the next two weeks and you'll be virtually guaranteed to see some variation of this scene.