June 06, 2003

NO MORE LACI: I just

NO MORE LACI: I just watched the replay of tonight's episode of Greta Van Susteran's Fox News show, and despite all the major news stories going on right now (the WMD search, Hillary's book, the Raines resignation, the Martha indictment, etc.), Greta's show was devoted singularly to one topic: the Laci Peterson case. That today was a relatively news-free day in the case didn't seem to matter; ever since the war in Iraq ended all of the cable news channels have pretty much been all-Laci, all the time, covering the everyday minutae of the case the way they once did the war, Chandra Levy, and the Florida recount.
Why this case is any more important or newsworthy than any of the other thousands of murders in the last year is something I stopped trying to understand a long time ago (I'm not normally one for race-based conspiracy theories, but I would imagine the Laci hysteria has something to do with the belief that the death of an attractive white woman is a much greater tragedy than that of anyone else).
In the meantime, I'm sick to death of hearing about this case. I'm sick of Geraldo talking about it on every show every day. I'm sick of that big-haired monster, Gloria Allred, who's somehow allowed to be a TV talking head while simultaneously representing Scott Peterson's Paula Jones-lookalike mistress. I'm sick of whole news segments devoted to changes in Scott Peterson's hairstyle. And most of all, I'm sick of much more important news stories getting shunted aside in favor of this very run-of-the-mill murder case. One day last week half of an episode of the usually-serious "Hardball" (the first half) was devoted to the Peterson case; it's only a matter of time before Keith Olbermann gets sick of the demands from his Laci-obsessed bosses, and stalks off the set of "Countdown."
The news today was that the judge in the case may impose a gag order on all of the participants. Good! But why stop there? How's about we slap a muzzle on Geraldo, O'Reilly, Larry King, Aaron Brown, and everyone else whose coverage-to-actual-news ratio has been so embarrassingly high in regards to the case these past three months?

Posted by Stephen Silver at June 6, 2003 04:28 AM
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