It doesn’t happen often, so when high-profile figures in the mainstream news media express the same frustration with their industry that the rest of us feel, it’s noteworthy.
For example, sports broadcaster Bob Costas routinely sits in for Larry King on CNN. But last week, he decided he couldn’t, in good conscience, guest host the program.
The cable news fixation on Natalee Holloway’s disappearance in Aruba has at least one high-profile dissenter.
Veteran sports broadcaster Bob Costas declined to fill in as host on CNN’s “Larry King Live” Thursday night because of the program’s focus that night on the missing Alabama teenager and on Dennis Rader, the BTK serial killer.
Costas — who has been serving as an occasional substitute for King since June — bowed out of the Thursday show after he could not persuade producers to change the program’s lineup, which included an interview with Beth Holloway Twitty, the mother of the high school senior who disappeared in Aruba in late May.
“I didn’t think the subject matter of Thursday’s show was the kind of broadcast that I should be doing,” Costas said in a statement, adding that he “respectfully declined to participate.”
Good for him. The truth is, yet another hour on Holloway and the BTK serial killer on CNN primetime isn’t the kind of broadcast anyone should be doing. Costas’ refusal should be a wakeup call to producers. It won’t, of course, but it should.
Also note, Costas wasn’t the only one to voice these concerns publicly recently.
As C&L noted, CNN’s Jack Cafferty also blasted the media’s obsession with sensationalized nonsense. To his credit, Cafferty did so on the air.
“It’s like the world’s gone mad, Wolf. I mean, what a charade. The BTK killer actually shed a tear or two during this sentencing hearing, this circus today. That was on the outside. He had to be laughing hysterically on the inside. We, the news media and the criminal justice system played right into his hands. A two-day sentencing hearing that was televised live around the world after he’d already confessed.
“We ought to be ashamed of ourselves. Publicity is this monster’s gasoline. It’s what kept him going during the years he was playing cat and mouse with the cops and murdering innocent people. He loved being the BTK killer. He loved reading about himself in the newspapers, watching the television stories on the local news in Kansas, on the nights before he got caught.
“Doesn’t anybody get this? This thing should have been sentenced in a closed courtroom in 30 seconds and thrown into a hole to rot. I’m a little embarrassed to be a part of the media on a day like this.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to check to see if a shark has attacked Michael Jackson….