Jodi Arias is Guilty; So Are We
Photo Credit: Bernard GoldbergThere are times, not many thankfully, when I get depressed, brought down by the sorry evidence that we live in a country fixated on shiny objects. This is one of those times.
A jury in Phoenix has found Jodi Arias guilty of first-degree murder. That’s not what gets me down. What I find so depressing is our collective fascination with trivia, with anything that we can follow without having to actually think.
No one ever heard of Jodi Arias until cable TV made her famous. No one ever heard of the boyfriend she killed, you know, what’s his name. The Arias murder trial tells us nothing about anything bigger than Jodi Arias. She wasn’t famous like O.J. Simpson before she was arrested. This wasn’t Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial. Those trials had implications. The Arias trial had none.
When it became known that the jury had reached a verdict, cable news went wall-to-wall with Jodi Arias. It would be 90 minutes before the verdict was announced in court, so anchors and pundits spent the time saying nothing – nothing that mattered anyway. But this is a small point. Saying nothing about Jodi Arias gets you more viewers than saying something about the national debt.
But you can’t blame cable TV news, not entirely anyway, because television is a business that gives the people what they want. And if they want Jodi, TV executives will give them Jodi for hours on end. Hell, if she had been found not guilty they might have even given her a show.
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