Like a starved flesh-eating virus or a Ding-Dong-addicted fatty, today’s media gorged on celebrity perversion to the exclusion of all else except the realization that drab old Laura Bush can make even Anne, the Princess Royal seem fashionable.
The usually DoublePlusGood CNN mounted a daylong campaign of innuendo, file footage and, my old favorite, unsupported speculation against a recent member of the cursed Minelli-Gest wedding party and his well-known, and I guess tolerated until needed, predilection for pre-teen boys.
Early on, Wolf Blitzer’s generic bloviation was fixated on “poor fragile Michael” Jackson with a relentless intensity missing from older and less sexy issues of war and leaks. Possibly because, in the words of faux-trendy Anderson Cooper, “Its all so sad.”
Is it?
Is this celebrity sideshow, hideous, as it might be for any allegedly real child victim, more tragic than war?
CNN, later in the day, answered my question within an idiotic reporter roundtable moderated by tonight’s more washy than wishy Aaron Brown. Of course the topic was Michael Jackson and an excited guest, after a silly bitch fight with Court TV's Diane Dimond, gushed that the Jackson story would be “the biggest story of 2003. Bigger than the Iraq war!”
To their most likely inadvertent credit, Brown and another moon-faced talking head were befuddled into a few seconds silence by the gross stupidity of the statement. One could clearly see, in their large cow eyes, a realization that, perhaps, a line had been crossed.
It had.
I really think CNN owes an apology to the families of our soldiers.
This perverted sideshow is only that.
Any comparison to the sacrifice of our military in these last few years of war is despicable and any suggestion that their sacrifice has less news value than Michael Jackson’s current crisis is a true perversion of the first magnitude.
I think an on-air apology by CNN must happen.

Photo: AP

- posted by Sean @ 9:59 PM