Issue date: 11/8/02 Section: Entertainment

Call me a sucker for the new trends, but I couldn't get enough Sniper news. I won't lie about it—the whole incident excited me. Some described it as an "obsessive admiration for the Washington Sniper." I'm sure my thinking of the Sniper as something of a criminal genius worried and offended my peers.

The Sniper murdered people. That people died should have offended me and I was sick and deranged for being entertained by it, right? But how many times do we go to the movies and pay money to watch people fake death? A good chunk of the music being made glorifies or at least in some way thrusts violence into our faces. At the risk of sounding cold and callous, the people killed in the D.C. area are as dead to me as actors in movies, and their deaths are equally meaningful to me.

Should we cease to be entertained by violent images in the media outlets? If we criticize one person for being entertained by the Sniper, we should also be careful to include everyone who finds senseless violence entertaining in our critique. Rest assured, though, that Tipper Gore and Joe Lieberman will steer clear of criticizing the media's coverage.

The media surely deserves such criticism. Sniper coverage was, by and large, shameful. So many found the story entertaining because that was exactly what the media made it: entertainment.

With a war vote pending in the Congress, most news services still ran the string of shootings in the lead spot. Close gubernatorial and congressional races that may very well determine the future of our country (or then again may not) could not nudge sensationalism out of the way.

Recent media coverage, particularly of the shootings, resembles a Hollywood thriller. I half expect every story shown on CNN or MSNBC to run like a movie trailer. Coming soon to a suburban community near you: The Sniper, rated R. We should be informed by the media, first and foremost; entertainment should always be secondary.

Using loaded, hokey language like "on the loose" to describe the killer was bad enough. Worse still was the packaging of the story.

Soon after the news broke that suspects were in custody and that a good amount of preliminary evidence pointed towards their guilt, MSNBC ran a story focusing on the life of John Allen Muhammad tagged "Descent into evil." Two things disturb me about the story. First, using the word "evil" implies a guilt that a court has yet to determine. Secondly, "Descent into evil" should be the title of the made-for-TV movie that will surely appear in the coming years. MSNBC failed the public in their language.

Continued...

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