« Coming Soon to a Theater Near You: Terrorism? | Main | Interchange Not Supported by Red Hat Anymore »

OpinionJournal: Cable TV Coverage of D.C. Sniper is "Pure Melodrama"

In one of the more candid opinion pieces published during the entire D.C.-area Sniper Case, Daniel Henninger of OpinionJournal.com likens the coverage of the investigation to the "Unreal City" that T.S. Elliot spoke about in his poem The Waste Land.


What we've all been watching on these stations lately is mostly live, so in some sense undoubtedly real. But what could be weirder or more bizarre than the unreal city of cable news, which reports, without discrimination, what it knows, what it almost knows and what no one knows?....

Not since long ago when villagers whispered that witches danced in the night-forest, has mere rumor been elevated to such high status in the life of a society.... Making such terrible events seem somehow unreal was a challenge. But we've met it. Trying to "report" live, much less talk about something like this for hours on end is not normal.

Post a comment

(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)

About CTDATA

CTDATA Venutures (CTDATA) develops Internet and Intranet applications for corporations and non profit organizations. Our services include:

  • Consulting services for Movable Type and TypePad-based publishing systems (visit our Weblog Improvement website for more information),
  • Financial services business process consulting,
  • Content management system and knowledge management system consulting,
  • Apache web server engineering and hosting,
  • MySQL, Sybase, and Microsoft SQL Server architecture and development,
  • SOAP, REST, and XML-RPC system architecture and programming, including Amazon Web Services and
  • Weblog publishing.
For more information, contact Dave Aiello by email at dave [at] daveaiello.com or call him at +1-267-352-4420.
Copyright © 1995-2010, CTDATA Ventures. All Rights Reserved.
Powered by
Movable Type 4.25