A world gone mad.
Okay, let's start with this: It's not that I don't like Heath Ledger.
But, let's be serious here for a moment. Celebrities, like all human beings, are not immortal. They die. Sometimes from natural causes and sometimes not. Sometimes young and sometimes old. But the one universal thing is that it's going to happen to all of us.
This is not, I repeat *not*, a good enough reason to force all other news coverage to the back burner just to tell us about how much people loved the guy, or how much his autopsy *didn't* reveal. We're sitting on the verge of a recession, we're in the middle of an interminable "war", we have a presidential primary campaign going on. All of these things affect your life and my life and the lives of everybody we know far more than Heath Ledger.
The fact that people are interested in this is beside the point, honestly. A news organization has the responsibility to report what people *need* to hear most, not what they *want* to hear most. I'm sorry for the loss of his family and friends, but there's the key... the number of people in, say, CNN's audience who are in either of those categories is infinitesimal. The rest of us really need to move on.
But, let's be serious here for a moment. Celebrities, like all human beings, are not immortal. They die. Sometimes from natural causes and sometimes not. Sometimes young and sometimes old. But the one universal thing is that it's going to happen to all of us.
This is not, I repeat *not*, a good enough reason to force all other news coverage to the back burner just to tell us about how much people loved the guy, or how much his autopsy *didn't* reveal. We're sitting on the verge of a recession, we're in the middle of an interminable "war", we have a presidential primary campaign going on. All of these things affect your life and my life and the lives of everybody we know far more than Heath Ledger.
The fact that people are interested in this is beside the point, honestly. A news organization has the responsibility to report what people *need* to hear most, not what they *want* to hear most. I'm sorry for the loss of his family and friends, but there's the key... the number of people in, say, CNN's audience who are in either of those categories is infinitesimal. The rest of us really need to move on.