The Scales of Death

The Scales of Death

This morning, I turned on CNN to find out the latest news, but was instead treated to a live, non-stop coverage of the sentencing of Joseph Smith, the Florida child murderer. The cameras held an unflinching eye to Smith's grotesque face as the judge laboriously read over every aggravating and mitigating circumstance. His conclusion: Smith should die. Duh!

I tried flipping to MSNBC, but the same story played incessantly there. This is just another example of the media's preference for sensationalism over substance. Where was the useful news in the death sentence of a child killer and rapist? Yes, the girl's death was horrible and tragic, the perpetrator a brutal beast unfit for life.

But, I kept asking myself--What of Iraq? What of Katrina? Some 87 people died in Iraq in a single day this week. Where was the live coverage of that? Instead, after the Florida fatal charade, the network deemed it sufficient to show a 30-second clip of Gen. John Abizaid testifying before Congress that things aren't as bad as they seem in Iraq. They also showed us another short clip of Saddam testifying in his trial. This was the man we spent several hundreds of billions of dollars to bring to justice, yet all his proceedings were worth was a sound bite or two in between the murders of young white girls.

We no longer have a balance in this country between what is real and what is not. What's important? The salacious and violent. What's unimportant? Anything to do with "others" who dwell in a far-off land. That's why we have a former baseball-club owner as president, and a former lousy actor as governor. We lack a sense of proportion, when all information devolves into talking blondes regaling our senses with "infotainment."