Breaking News…Natalee Holloway Alive! Cheerleaders Dead!

I’m still holding out hope that Natalee Holloway will be found alive, quivering in the corner of a dark room in a dirty whorehouse in South America after her third round of sex with a Venezuelan businessman in one night; a victim of the white slave trade rather than murder. Certainly that’s what Greta Van Susteren, and the other media leeches who are still trying to suck blood out of the story over two years after the fact, are hoping.

Perhaps Geraldo Rivera can pose as a john, infiltrate said brothel, throw the pretty young blonde white woman over his shoulders, and deliver her back to her media savvy mom. Just think of the ratings. It could run during the Super Bowl halftime and upstage the game.

By this point everyone is aware of and pretends to be disgusted by “Missing White Woman Syndrome”. One flooded Pi Phi sorority house would easily attract more news cameras than New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward. When an attractive white woman meets her demise the media provides us with an endless feed of stale “breaking” news. We, the audience, condemn the obvious pandering for ratings and then, evidently, misplace the remote control.

One of my personal favorite examples of the shallowness of modern news (and the news devouring public) was the story of five high school cheerleaders from upstate New York who died in a fiery auto crash last year. Teen drivers die in crashes with an alarming frequency (almost ten a day in 2003), but these girls and their headshots were featured as the main news story on CNN.com for at least two days.

Contrast that with this accident in Alabama, which I didn't come across until researching this article. It made the national news sites because people will always click on a link that says “dead cheerleader”, but it didn’t have the legs of the original cheerleader death story. I can’t help noticing that the Alabama girls are a tad bit chubbier, less photogenic, than their New York counterparts.

I’m not upset that the media plays to this lowest common denominator. They are businesses with bottom lines. If the public wanted to read about poor people in the inner city getting murdered, and fat, unattractive people dying prematurely in car wrecks, then CNN would gladly give it to us. What I do mind is the hypocritical, holier-than-thou attitude of the people who try to denounce what they eagerly consume — like rubberneckers who bitch about the traffic jam they are causing.

Let’s just stop the charade. CNN and Fox News can start running a regular feature called “Premature Deaths of Good Looking Women”. It will feel good for all of us to come clean.