By Staff
Nancy Grace makes me sick.
Rosie O'Donnell really makes me sick.
National TV news media makes me sick, especially when it swoops in and makes a tragic situation all the more horrible. Did we really need to host the Today Show on Virginia Tech's campus less than 24 hours after it suffered this nation's most heinous mass shooting by a crazed gunman?
Did those Virginia Tech officials really need to deal with that when they should have been focusing every ounce of their energy on caring for their students and faculty and their families?
I was complaining about the above earlier this week, specifically about Nancy Grace and her show on Headline News on the evening of the shooting, when the person to whom I was complaining asked me if I watched the show.
I said I did, and commented that Grace was inappropriate in her rush to judgment of the conduct of the Virginia Tech police department, making the comment Monday night, "Why didn't somebody call the real police?"
The person to whom I was speaking then pointed his finger at me and said, "I blame you," for the conduct of the national news media and TV personalities like Nancy Grace during news events like the one this week at Virginia Tech.
His point was this: We may all complain about the news media, but we feed the frenzy by supporting just such reporting.
We say we find it disgusting, but we seem to be glued to every minute of television coverage of anything sensational – whatever is the crisis of the week, be it the death of Anna Nicole or Don Imus or such a tragedy like the one at Virginia Tech.
And isn't it horrible to lump the Anna Nicole or Don Imus issue in with that of something like Virginia Tech? However, national news makes no distinction in its vigor to cover such stories.
We've trained the national media to respond to news stories like this because we watch them. Come on, admit it. You know you watch it.
It really is that simple. Because we watch it, advertisers spend big, big dollars to hone in on that air time.
Further, it's ridiculous that we can tell you everything you want to know about Anna Nicole Smith or Sanjaya, but we haven't a clue what Fred Upton or Debbie Stabenow did this week to work on our behalf in Washington.
Fact is, most people you meet during the course of a day couldn't even tell you who those two people are. They may could tell that you that Hillary Clinton was behind the John F. Kennedy Jr. plane crash because she feared he would run for the New York Senate seat she wanted – or at least that's what one grocery store tabloid reported recently. But I'll bet they couldn't tell you the name of the chief justice of the Supreme Court. Don't believe me? What's his name?
A perfect example is the incredible flack over the naming of the Main Street Bridge. Everyone had an opinion and the debate even got nasty.
However, I wonder if those same people who were so concerned about the naming of the bridge are equally as concerned about cuts in funding of public education in Michigan, about how we are going to finance much-needed repairs to our infrastructure or about how our municipalities cannot afford to provide services like police protection with revenue sharing funds all but going away?
We've got our priorities way, way out of line as a society. I'm not sure why that is, but we're suffering the consequences.
I'm sure this column is going to make some of you sick. All I have to say about that is, I know how you feel.