The following op-ed piece by E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post makes an excellent point about the skewed priorities and interests of the news media—and, in turn, those who are consumers of the glittering pablum that all too often passes for journalism these days:
Who could not laugh about the news that Leona Helmsley left her dog “Trouble” a $12 million trust fund while cutting two of her grandchildren out of her will? The queen of mean, as the tabloids called her, commanded that when “Trouble dies, her remains shall be buried next to my remains in the Helmsley mausoleum.”
But maybe Helmsley’s obsessions aren’t as different from our own as we’d like to think. Consider the contrast between the extravagant coverage afforded Michael Vick for his guilty plea on a federal dogfighting charge and the scant attention given a new Census Bureau finding that the number of Americans without health insurance had risen by 2.2 million, to 47 million. The number of Americans under 18 without health insurance increased to 8.7 million.
The Census report was a one-day story largely buried on the inside pages. So do we care more about dogs than uninsured kids?
Animal lovers: Hold your brickbats. Our family has a delightful dog rescued from a shelter, and I hate cruelty to our canine friends. The issue here is not dogs but people, specifically people in the media.
Why is it that the poor — and, for that matter, the struggling middle class, too — disappear in the media, barricaded behind our fixation on celebrity, our titillation with personal sin and public shame, our fascination with every detail of every divorce and affair of every movie star, rock idol and sports phenom?
The hiding of the poor is systematic, according to a new study of 38 months of nightly news broadcasts on CBS, NBC and ABC by Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR), a left-of-center organization devoted to media criticism.
“With rare exceptions, such as the aftermath of Katrina,” the study found, “poverty and the poor seldom even appear on the evening news — and when they do, they are relegated mostly to merely speaking in platitudes about their hardships.” [full text]
Kmareka.com 
I have a modest proposal for Leona Helmsley’s dog. To give it the proper care, why not endow animal shelters nationwide, in case it ever runs away, and hire twenty or thirty people to be on-call dogwalkers, and pay some old folks home to establish the dog as the honored canine in residence?
I wish I was controlling that money. I once worked in the nursing home that had the psychic cat, and believe me, that place was a cat’s paradise. The previous cat had lived to age twenty.
I expect that most would have difficulty with Ms Helmsley’s life (and death) choices. The Madam of Nasty perhaps realized completely that she would receive still more attention for providing for her dog to the neglect of her own children and grandchildren, or the needs of others–poor kids needing clothes or scholarships for college educations they cannot afford. But Ms Hlmsley did receive the attention she seemed to want all her life, did she not?
Mr. Vick, however, received the attention he did not want. The comparison between his misdeeds, horrid, cruel and murderous, as well as those of his “friends” (although business associates seems more appropriate mthan just friends)speaks for itself. One must wonder at the stupidity of Mr. Vick, supposedly a college graduate, exposed to great ideas, moral issues, and all the rest of the knowledge base that our colleges transmit, even to college atheletes. I for one would enjoy reading intervies of Mr. Vick’s college professors and perhaps we will discover the imbalances of education and life history. But to raise the Vick issue in the same vein as the poverty in America issue or the health care crisis, is very different. Vick belongs with other bad characters, some of whom also started out as animal killers for thrill and ended up translating the ease of killing dogs or cats to other bad acts.