The Banality of the News Media

With all that’s going on in the world, I tuned into the Today this morning to see what was going on. What with the Supreme Court nominee, everything happening with North Korea and the GM bankruptcy, I thought I would get caught up with what was going on with each of those subjects. I wondered what would be the first story.

Wow was I surprised when the first story on Today and in fact on all the other network morning programs (because I checked it out) was about this story:

A suburban mother who claimed she and her daughter had been abducted and stuffed in a car trunk is in custody in Florida after the pair were found at Disney World, where they had flown hours after the mother reporting their abduction, a prosecutor said Wednesday.

And each station went on and on and on about it. The first five minutes of each program was devoted to this “story” On each network the Bucks County prosecutor was interviewed. And in one really great question the prosecutor was asked if this was racial profiling because the alleged abductors were black. I’m not an expert but the following definition is what I think racial profiling is:

“Racial Profiling” refers to the discriminatory practice by law enforcement officials of targeting individuals for suspicion of crime based on the individual’s race, ethnicity, religion or national origin.

The above is from the ACLU web site

So there’s no way you could consider this racial profiling by the police because they were responding to information provided by a supposed “victim”. Law enforcement was in no way initiating the targeting of people.

After babbling on about this story for what seemed like forever they finally got to the real news of the day. How sad and how far these shows have fallen.