News Priorities

Romenesko today links to a Salt Lake Tribune editorial that asks the national news media covering the murder of Lori Hacking to simply, as the headline reads, "Go away."

Writes the paper:

This is a local story, involving the pain of local people, investigated and prosecuted by local officials and thoroughly covered by the local media. Further reporting of this story for any other audience, beyond short updates, is a waste of videotape, ink and, most of all, time.

When this story is all over it might, in the hands of a perceptive writer, make a good magazine article. But it really appears no different than the sad tales of hundreds of other women who, each year, are killed by those they trusted the most.

For Fox News, MSNBC and, most disappointing of all, CNN - the Network of Record - to be spending so much time hashing, rehashing and, most of all, speculating on the gory details of this single case is an excellent example of what's wrong with the mass media today.

Every minute spent by Larry King or Fox News on Lori Hacking or Laci Peterson is a minute they don't spend on health care, education, environmental quality, national security, the economy or other real issues that should be the center of public attention, especially in an election year.

A nation full of people who know more about Scott Peterson's defense strategy than they do about Donald Rumsfeld's is not a nation that shows much ability to govern itself.

Ahh, but if it were only that easy. These stories are like nuggets of crack -- we all find ourselves going out of our way to read about them, or watch stories about them, yet feel vaguely disgusted with ourselves afterward that we didn't use that time on something that even remotely impacted our lives.

Of course, the L.A. broadcast media continue to act like these are local stories.

Meanwhile, as usual, the war in our own backyard will go underreported. The LA Times' Jill Leovy reports today on the bloody weekend in Los Angeles County: 17 murders in what she describes as an "exceptionally violent" three days:

August is the worst month for killings in the county, but the tally from the first full weekend of the month this year was worse than usual.

Two double homicides in South Los Angeles and one triple homicide in South Gate boosted the total.

Victims were spread from Valinda to Van Nuys and included a single mother of four who was killed in an unexplained street shooting, and a 79-year-old man who struck his head on a sidewalk during a fight.

But most of the victims were young Latino males, such as Jorge Valenzuela, 21, of Los Angeles, one of five young men sprayed with gunfire during a particularly brutal incident just after noon on Sunday in the Los Angeles Police Department's 77th Street Division.