Beyond Chandra Levy
Libertarian Democrat Terry Michael takes issue with the Wash Post's new maxi-series on the unsolved murder in 2001 of Chandra Levy:
"The Chandra Levy case captivated the world."
You can see those breathless words for yourself if you navigate to a washingtonpost.com web page posted Friday, July 11 touting a 12-part series about a dead intern (yes, you read that correctly: twelve!), the first installment of which was plastered across the front page of the Post's Sunday print edition two days later.
Stop whatever you're doing and think about that. Reporting staffs are being decimated all over the American daily newspaper landscape. Seasoned journalists are being forced into early retirement buy-outs. Hundred-year-old news values–objectivity, fairness, dispassion, fact-based arguments, proportionality–are being trashed in an infotainment media culture that dumbs down public discourse to verbal food fights, featuring talking-pointed-heads on cable "news" channels.
And the paper of record in the capital of the free world, a few miles up the road from where Jefferson and Madison understood the importance of the printed word to our experiment in liberty, has used its investigative and metro staff resources to publish a 12 part (twelve!!!) tabloid-style series pandering to the prurient interests of readers captivated by the unsolved murder of an intern.
reason's Matt Welch defended the Chandra Levy coverage back in August 2001. Read that here.