Matters Of Importance

I really try to avoid talking about the Scott Peterson trial, but the news coverage today was yet another example of going way overboard in the amount of coverage for the story's actual importance. Interestingly, it was the usually tasteful KTVU News that led their hour-long nightly broadcast with nearly ten minutes worth Peterson coverage and then teased their extended take for the later half of the broadcast including a story on how the Peterson coverage has distracted from other news stories. What they didn't say in the teaser that it would be stories of actual importance that lost out, but since KTVU is much closer to a hard news show than most local stations offerings I suspect that final "related story" was something they had wanted to do for a while. Beyond that I think the Peterson story got as much coverage as it did because it's an easy job. There have been virtually no new developments in the story that couldn't be summarized sufficiently in a single newspaper article that have happened in the last year, but yet it has had an enormous amount of time devoted to it. Of course, in all this coverage today who other than Amber Frey’s lawyer/book promoter found even more time to talk to the media and there are now rumors that the jurors who were present were considering book deals of their own. It’s just sickening.