Jeffrey M. McCall, a professor at DePauw University in Indiana, is just the latest of high-minded critics http://www.indystar.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050708/OPINION/507080409/1002 who trash cable news. In a piece in The Indianapolis Star entitled, "News ratings tell sad tale: Viewers want Natalee story” McCall laments that the newshounds-at-home are so interested in true-crime stories as they play out on the cablers. Intones McCall: "Knowing all there is to know about Natalee and the Michael Jackson trial will hardly contribute to maintaining our freedom."
But McCall's critique opens a window into the larger worldview of the Left. For four decades now, the Cultural-Critical Left has hated stories about crime, because the idea that poor people, or even ordinary people, are criminals gets in the way of the Left's peculiar devil-theory of crime: which is that the real source of crime is not personal, but rather institutional--that crime and injustice flow from the font of Big Business. So if you want to make a businessman the criminal, that's fine. But otherwise, in the view of liberal critics, crime stories are a diversion from the Real Problems: poverty, pollution, sexism, racism, homophobia, economic inequality, etc.
Hence the Left's permanent disdain for stories about Chandra Levy, Laci Peterson, and now, Natalee Holloway. But people care, and they watch. Why? Because those are the stories of their lives. They are stories of human drama, stories that could just as easily be about our loved ones. In addition they are cautionary tales, providing instruction to the impressionable about trusting, or not trusting, your instincts--not getting into a car with a stranger, about not automatically trusting people in internet chat rooms.
And if cable news and tabloid news contribute to that effort, more power to them! The Left can continue to be elitist, snobby, and dismissive of the concerns of regular people, living regular lives. But that's OK, we've gotten used to it by now. Happily, we can always change the channel on our self-appointed and self-declared Betters.
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