Friday, April 20, 2007

Harry Shearer: Media-Savvy Assassins

From the HuffPost Blog:

So Mr. Cho gets his fifteen minutes. The question bewildering journalism observers--why'd he send his goodie bag to NBC News?--has an easy answer: it was in gratitude for their firing of Imus.

Not so easy is the answer to the question: what is the possible journalistic explanation for splashing Cho's self-dramatizing poses and self-justifying bullshit over network and cable air? Did we learn anything useful during the spate of interviews of Charlie Manson years ago, except that he was one crazy motherfucker?

Cho's pathetic outpourings deserved to be put back where they came from--in a small room, with FBI guys sentenced to read/see and parse them. Instead, a hundred thousand self-pitying mentally ill young men (and women?) have just been shown the road to glory one more time. A society in which it's easier to become famous for killing people than for doing something useful or constructive is one remarkable place in which to live.

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