Terri Schiavo died this morning 13 days after she was disconnected from her food and water supply. RIP to her and sympathies to her family.
The media overkill of the Schiavo case now takes the belt held by the previous champion, Elian Gonzalez. Jessica Lynch was the runner-up. For the past three weeks, every single major American television news channel has run almost wall-to-wall coverage of this seemingly never-ending fiasco. The media couldn’t resist the urge to feed at the bottomless trough. Whether on NBC’s “Today Show” in the monrning or “The Abrams Report” at night, American attention has been systematically diverted from other important world issues to a hospice in Florida. Last night, on “Newsnight with Aaron Brown,” CNN spent the first 30 minutes of the newscast talking about the Schiavo case.
Twenty-four hour American “news” is the single greatest source of disinformation in the world today. The media race to keep stories in the news has created a situation where hype is more important than fact, and reporters are forced to follow relatively insignificant stories in order to stay in front of the competition. Twenty-four hour news channels successfully convinced America that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he was working in concert with Osama bin Laden. They have convinced America that democracy is spreading in Lebanon because of Bush policies, etc. Television media is searching for one thing–ratings, which equal dollars. And the television media has discovered that there are millions of fat, lazy Americans parked on their couches ready to ingest whatever is fed to them.
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