"A serious matter"

The other day one of the daytime hosts of CNN HLN said that when they came back from break they'd be discussing a serious matter. What might that be? People making fun of Disney tv star Demi Lovato's weight on Twitter after she made an appearance at an MTV awards show.

Look: An eating disorder (which Lovata had) and people harassing someone with one over their weight is a serious matter. For the person involved and their friends and family. It's not "a serious matter" for a national "news" network. It's gossip.

A serious matter for a news network might be something like this

A U.S. diplomatic cable made public by WikiLeaks provides evidence that U.S. troops executed at least 10 Iraqi civilians, including a woman in her 70s and a 5-month-old infant, then called in an airstrike to destroy the evidence, during a controversial 2006 incident in the central Iraqi town of Ishaqi.

Of course, that CNN HLN is not actually a news network but rather a tabloid that specializes in celebrity gossip and sensationalized crimes featuring attractive young white females is not exactly a secret.

But it's not as if the other networks are much better. (I would highly recommend following up the preceeding link with this post by Jay Rosen on the whys of broken political coverage.)