Selling Jon Benet

by digby

Bob Geiger (posting again at this old digs) wrote about the media obsession with the Jon Benet Ramsey over the week-end:

In their warped news judgment, the media is deciding for all of us that we should be more concerned about the minute-by-minute developments with John Mark Karr than the fact that our brave men and women continue to be lost in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are making a decision every hour that a story of such incredibly specious importance, is more relevant than the deaths of our men and women serving in uniform overseas.

They can’t get enough of it. And either there is serendipitious synchronicity in the air, or the NY Times pushed up its feature series on child porn to take advantage of the situation. I just watched CNN’s Kiera host the reporter who did the investigation, Kurt Eichenwald, and spend at least 10 minutes discussing the various disgusting things these child predators do. Yesterday the story was about fake child actor sites that featured clothes or covered children in sexy poses in order to circumvent the child porn laws.

Here’s my question. Considering this new awareness of the use of overly sexualized visual images of children by pedophiles, why has nobody taken the networks to task for repeatedly showing those Jon Benet beauty pageant videos ten years after the fact? They had them on a loop the first time around and ten years later they are showing them again. Over and over and over. It’s always made me uncomfortable. It seems to me that the news networks are feeding pedophiles’ sick urges the same way these online sites are by repeatedly showing these creepy vids. Are they actually getting big ratings by tittilating the audience with thinly veiled child pornography? Ewww.

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