They Report, You Decide

Before 9/11, I rarely watched TV news. But that morning we were totally caught off-guard, with my husband walking out the door to catch a flight to LA, and me just getting back from dropping off our 8th-grader at school, when the phone rang. It was a friend telling us a plane had just struck the World Trade Center. The rest, as they say, is history.

Since then I am in the habit of turning on the TV every morning, once mid-day, and again at night, just to be sure there are no towers falling, storms coming, bombs dropping, or what have you. So I am pretty much up-to-speed on the different news organizations and what they deem important. Today on CNN, still considered to be the "best" and "unbiased" source of news, despite their abysmal ratings and obvious hard-on for President Obama, the reporters are out in force, all focused on those just-released women who were abducted ten years ago by three scumbag brothers. Cameras and crowds of supporters fill the streets of the ramshackle Cleveland neighborhood, now somewhat cheerier, festooned as it is with balloons and teddy bears. Suddenly we are all supposed to care deeply about those sordid, terribly tragic lives that have absolutely no connection to ours.

Over at FOX News, the purported bad boy of journalism, there is non-stop coverage of the second hearing on Capitol Hill concerning the deaths of four American at the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi last September. The Senators are trying to determine who was responsible, what went wrong, and how can such nefarious activity be avoided in the future.

Which story matters most? You decide.