A Dead Horse, A Love-Crazed Astronaut and Anna Nicole Smith -
a reflection on the 24-hour news

About two weeks ago, a Kentucky Derby-Winning Horse died. CNN even went so far as to send a breaking news alert to my computer (I am crazy enough to subscribe to such a thing) and then actually interrupted their regular broadcast to show a press conference about the demise of said horse. OK, I admit it, I am not crazy about horses, they are too big and don't come with brakes, and yes, I understand that some people like them. However, showing tearful owners, vets, and assorted two-legged friends of the horse in a press briefing was a bit too much, considering, some crazy-assed suicide bomber just blew himself up somewhere in Iraq, taking dozens of incocent people (PEOPLE, not horses) with him.

Then, in the beginning of last week, some love-crazed astronaut actually went through the painful ordeal to load up her car full of assorted torture instruments, stuffed herself into a space diaper (really) and drove 900 miles from Houston, Texas, to Orlando, Florida. This all in an attempt to kill some other lady whom she suspected had a love affair with her "lover" or whatever this man was to this married mother of three. No matter what newschannel I turned on, same story, NASA people, skrinks, experts commenting on a love triagle gone a bit off. Heck, one does not need to be a rocket scientist (excuse the use of language here) to figure out that a Navy Captain in diapers is insane or at least quite deranged. But no, we got two full days of that crap, again, against the background of Iran playing big guy, people being blown up in Iraq and New York being snowed in with poor people without heat. Insane.

On Thursday morning or whenever that was (I really must have lost track of time ), they were still at it about this astronaut when I thought to myself, "Petra, there is no getting out of this, this one is big, bigger than you realize, maybe bigger than life itself." Then suddenly, out of nowhere, the heavens were sounding, another CNN news alert came to me through the digital nirvana, I thought to myself, hmmm, maybe Fatah and Hamas signed some agreement to not kill each other off (no), maybe the insurgents in Iraq laid down their arms and called it quits so the US forces would leave them alone (no, again), maybe the Senate passed some meaningful bill for all of us (heck, wrong again), or maybe yet another US helicopter was shot down by those bastard insurgents leaving many of our own dead (totally off here on my part). Then my hopes for world peace turned into rubber right there and then, when I read about Anna Nicole Smith having been found unresponsive in some hotel in Florida . I was stunned, because for a moment I thought I had all figured out ... the newsfolks were just a few steps behind me ... reality (for me) was that this diaper-lady drove to Florida (she did) and accidently hit some former stripper, instead of the other lady, things sure were beginning to look interesting there for a minute when CNN's live coverage threw me be back to reality: the astronaut apparently had nothing to do with Anna, and darn, there went a really good story in my mind. A few minutes later another "news alert" for me, again, hoping against hope, that the Palestinians and Israeli police have stopped trying to kill each other at the site of the Old Temple, maybe that the Iraqis have finally gotten their act together, a Scooter Libby conviction, but no, a dead Anna Nicole. For those of you who have missed the news lately, she is dead, and continues to be dead to this day, I have figured this out without CNN breaking news alert, or FOX's "Just In" Alerts, or some other interruption on MSNBC.

Just as I thought that things could not get much worse, virtually every news channel stopped reporting about the news and covered the live and death of Anna Nicole in great depth. I do have to give some credit to Anderson Cooper and Lou Dobbs on CNN for actually spending the majority of their shows reporting about what they said they would report about, only mentioning Anna Nicole in passing (AMEN). But a big BOO to Larry King, he actually dedicated at least two hours of his program to this women. Again, tearful friends, experts, lawyers abound, trying to figure out who on earth the father of her baby girl really is (at that point only two in the contest) and how her estate would be divided.

The only sane person (apart from Anderson and Lou) seemed to have been Jack Cafferty, who finally asked the viewers something about their feelings about the excessive coverage of this ex-playmate, ex-stripper, someone, who really hasn't done anything for anybody else (heck she couldn't even keep her son alive who apparently died of an overdose cocktail of anti-depressants and methadone, shaken, but not stirred) and who married some half-dead dude millionaire when she was in her 20s. Yes, I have made my discontent with the whole situation known, especially to Jack, and Wolf Blitzer who actually claimed that "viewers were watching with interest." No, Wolf, we weren't watching the story unfold with interest, we were enduring it, over and over again, because you all couldn't be bothered to actually report the news of the day, there was nothing else on you moron.

What a depicable state of this nation's new media. In a letter to Larry King, I asked him to please start devoting five full minutes to each and every service member killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, with the same empathy he gave to Anna-Nicole's sister. He hasn't started yet (maybe not even read my letter). But I think he read my letter but figured out he just couldn't do it. Think about it, at five minutes for each service member (for simplicity's sake let's say, oh, around 3,000 or so dead Americans), that would add up to a grand total of 15,000 minutes airtime, or would come up to about 250 hours. Let's again assume that Larry King airs about 250 times a year (bingo), that would mean, he would have to spend a whole year talking about people who really mattered to a lot of people, and can't have questionable characters such as that bizarro Jon Benet-wanted-to-be-killer on, and no, no experts either. Maybe mentioning our fallen servicemembers' names would be a start, but that might take up too much airtime and distract you all from reporting about the news from a parallel universe.