A Sad World We Live In

So earlier on Monday morning, I woke up as usual and plopped in front of my television set and watched CNN Headline News with breakfast in tow. It was the first day of the work week, so I was not in a hurry to leave for work, as I had worked on Saturday.

After a quick commercial break, the news reported the death of Italian designer Gianfranco Ferre. CNN Headline News dedicated about a good 45 seconds to the story, even went so far as sharing which celebrities are loyal customers (i.e. Oprah). For Headline News, 45 seconds is considered pretty extensive coverage.

This, of course, is no big deal, until I realized that the little headlines ticker on the bottom of the screen simultaneously had this scroll by during said 45 second coverage of Ferre’s death: Sheik Jamal al-Din Abdul Karim al-Dabban, Iraq's top Sunni Arab religious leader, died Sunday of a heart attack at 68, an official said; he was seen as a moderate who did not play a significant role in the Iraqi insurgency. AP

Of the deaths that were considered newsworthy, I was shocked that the death of an Italian fashion designer was given more extensive coverage, whereas the death of a rather significant person in the history-in-the-making of Iraq was given a few seconds of scroll time. And what was worse is that in the entire hour, which had four cycles of “repeating” headline news, Christi Paul and Mike Galanos did not mention anything about the Sheik’s death, much less the reporting of a gaffe in which American forces accidentally arrested him in 2006!

You know we now live in a sad world of irrelevancy when a respected news channel dedicated to providing news 24/7 barely mentioned the death of an important religious cleric, but reported extensively on the death of some famous design icon. And Wayne Wiedman’s traveling cat.

Sigh...