Very Accomplished Woman in Tragic Local Story, part Two

Huh. Well, I wondered what it would take for the news to stop talking about the astronaut thing (I mean, seriously, even the Daily Show was piling on. They seemed to be heading in a promising direction – mocking the wealth of coverage on the topic. But then they veered right back into joining the chorus with the Riggle piece. Riggle's a great new correspondent and all but the whole thing about the control center launch was a lame duck. Just the wrong tone. They needed someone with less bombast and a sharper, nastier yet lighter touch like Hodgman or Oliver to take that one.). Guess what? A celebrity best known for taking off her clothes and marrying a 90 year old man is dead (And maybe for the shadenfraud of her reality show, I guess.).

Look, nothing against Ms. Smith and there's now a young girl who doesn't have a mother but, really, you have to bring the news to a halt and have hours of coverage about her death? It's not like there's any actual news there beyond her death. Everything else is wild speculation and uninformed guessing – you don't know how she died, you don't know what's going to happen to any of the many court cases the woman left behind, all you're doing is repeating the same questions over and over again. It's not particularly entertaining, it's certainly not enlightening, and I don't know why all of the news channels I flipped through when trying to catch my nightly broadcast news allotment were in crisis mode about this. I mean, I don't think even President Ford got as much talking head time. But, no, Anna Nicole gave us many hours of trainwreck rubbernecking so she gets the works.

If you want to know why people like myself are being driven away from watching the news in droves, well, I think there's your answer.

Atrios, as usual, says it best.