Monday, June 18, 2007

Worldwide Pants


By Lars Trodson

A week or so ago ABC had to apologize because it showed a picture of former Washington DC Mayor Marion Barry as it was teasing the story about the judge, Roy Pearson, who is suing a dry cleaner for $54 million for losing his pants.

"We are deeply sorry for this mistake," said ABC in a prepared statement.

How nice.

While I am certain both Mayor Barry and Judge Pearson were discomfited by the wrong identification, the deeper, more grievous wound to the general public is the fact that ABC is devoting any of its precious news resources on the pants suit (oh, the wordplay abounds!) to begin with.

There's war, global instability and a U.S. Government that seems incapable of getting out of its own way -- while all the while news department budgets are gutted.

To paraphrase Mr. Thatcher in "Citizen Kane": It must be fun to run a news department.

The other sad thing is that these news departments on TV think they're hip for covering the Pearson story because it broke on the Internet. But the web users who heard this story first had long ago moved on as the TV people were just getting around to it.

Keep at it, you network boys and girls. You're killing us.