Uh oh.
The media has all of a sudden become obsessed with the disappearance and killing of another pretty white girl.
Call me a cynic, but there are only two reasons this happens.
One is of course television ratings. Pretty white girls — usually but not always blonde — keep people glued to their television sets.
The other, less obvious, reason is that they’re trying to distract us from something else. Something that doesn’t fit their paradigm of what we should be thinking about in 2021 America.
As a former newspaperman, I’m pretty sure I know what that is.
There is nothing the electronic media wants more than another Trump campaign in 2024, and if there are a couple more “insurrections” between now and them, that would be a major bonus.
If the media hates anyone these days, it’s Joe Biden. Why? He’s boring. He doesn’t give them good sound bites, and compared to Dizzy Donald, he’s the perfect picture of sanity.
Biden is dog bites man, which we all know isn’t news.
Donald is man bites dog … again and again and again.
So when things aren’t going well for America’s Once and Future Lunatic, roll out the missing white girls. The only disappointment to our media is that the suspected killer isn’t either African-American or an illegal immigrant.
At least he’s not Eric Trump.
When all this is over at some point in the distant future and we have all passed on to our reward (or our punishment), it may be that historians will say it was 500 channels of cable television and 24-hour “infotainment” stations that killed our culture. As far back as 30 years ago, the media villain in the “Die Hard” movies said it best.
“People have the right to know everything about everyone all the time.”
But they don’t.
Not really.
But all the way back to the 1990s and cases like JonBenet Ramsey, and shows like Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones, what happened was that we lost the difference between fame and infamy. Comedian Elayne Boosler nailed it when she said we should stop making people famous for taking their clothes off or having sex with famous people.
Let’s be fair to Gabby Petito, the latest disappearing murdered white girl. She didn’t ask to be famous or infamous or anything in between. She went on a trip with her fiancee and wound up dead in Wyoming.
The media isn’t liberal.
It isn’t conservative either.
It’s corporate, and what it’s all about is maximizing profits for its stockholders.
That’s why Trump is a big deal, and the media does what it can to protect him and keep him in the news as a big story.
Someday he’ll die.
And a year or so after he’s buried, the media will stop hyping him.
If we’re lucky.