Thursday, March 27, 2008

Loathing and Sorrow in Iowa City

By now, it's probably national that a wealthy banker in Iowa City killed his family in a gruesome fashion and then rammed his car into a bridge to commit suicide. The banker had been arrested last month in a half-million dollar embezzlement case.

I can't bring myself to read more than a graf into the stories before my revulsion of the killing and the shameful pandering of the news media in this case make me want to throw up. And my local news media is certainly at fault. Wednesday's headline in the Register was, "Banker Bludegons Family After Car Exhaust Fails."

I, like my friend Nonpartisan, love the Progressive Era of history. I particularly love muckraking journalism where ever it can be found, either on the Internet or in small independent journals. These publications give me hope for our future while the large media disgusts and disappoints me day after day.

The Yellow journalism - the sensational, bloody, gory, freakish focus we have of the facts and not the context - I desperately wish we could kill and bury Yellow Journalism forever. Perhaps we can't have muckraking without yellow, but by dog, if we can, we should.

1 comment:

iamcoyote said...

Sorry, idio, I didn't mean to step on you! Funny, I was thinking the same thing as you when I read this story. How could parents not know that kid in the hospital bed wasn't their own?

As for the embezzler, what an asshole he is to screw up his own life and then makes his family pay for it. Frikkin' narcissistic society!