LETTER: 24-Hour News Overkill

When I was a child; right in my own school of fewer than 300 students, including all 12 grades; there were three tragic deaths within three years time. Did any of you hear about any of them? In today’s market, you would have. And repeatedly!

When Eddy butchered his grandparents, in their kitchen, and took their body parts out to a field on the family farm, and systematically plowed and “disked” them into the soil, then continued with his own life, including his bus ride to school everyday, we considered it to be a violent, egregious act, and he went to juvenile “prison” for it. But it was a private countryside local matter, and was handled as such.

When David conducted one-too-many lung capacity experiments from a measured air-intake system, with notebooks full of the data he compiled from these tests, his mother found him in his room, with a plastic bag taped over his head, and secured around his neck dead on a pile of paperwork. Did this even make one news cycle?

In 1972, in a small club in Dallas, where Main Street ends at Carroll Ave., I was present for a mass shooting that resulted in so much bloodshed that the floor had to be replaced because it couldn’t be cleaned. I even had blood on me under a booth where I hid. Nobody outside of the “Metroplex” ever heard about it.

Families had enough space and time and privacy to bury their dead, grieve their loss, regroup, repair, and eventually move on. Today’s ad infinitum, 24 hour news drum beat doesn’t allow for any story or event to be local anymore. Repeating a taped piece recorded from a grieving mom who has just claimed her son’s body, seems to me to be invasive, intrusive, mean and ill-advised. When will she process the personal private event of having lost a child?

I believe the intent of our ubiquitous, in-your-face manner of gathering and reporting of the “news” has nothing to do with informing the public. It serves to desensitize us to the ‘Gadianton robbers’ around us. If it were meant to be “information”, the story about the hole in the ozone layer beginning to repair itself, (and is now closing), would have been more than just a one-time 4-second early morning news blurb.
Disgusting!

Esther Ramos