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New York City Cat Rescued After 14 Days in Wall

You may have heard about this story. I hadn't before I got to New York, but this has become an international rather than a local story. This is a story that has been covered by the BBC. This is a story that has been covered in Japan. This is a story that has been covered on CNN. And last night, it was the top story on every local news channel.

To which I say: Are you kidding me?!

I am flabbergasted. Yes, it's a novelty, a human-interest (kitty-interest?) story. But to treat it like Baby Jessica down the well -- which in itself didn't deserve nearly as much coverage as it got in 1987, and I've got a 10-page paper of which I'm very proud to prove it -- is stunning.

One month ago in Milwaukee, two 12-year-old African-American boys vanished from a park near their homes. Where was the round-the-clock news coverage of that story? Where were the reporters live at the scene? Where was the media circus? And the kicker: Do you think there would have been more media attention if it had been Ashley and Brittany missing rather than Purvis and Quadrevion? If those African-American boys had been blonde-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian girls?

You can bet your ass there would have been.

Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they got the cat out of the wall. (I'm still a little confused as to how the cat ended up stuck in the wall in the first place, but I'm glad they got her out.) But I think the real story here is that what purports to be "news" is no longer news, but entertainment. Even the media frenzy that typically surrounds the disappearance or kidnapping of middle- or upper-class white children is unwarranted. I can't tell you how many soldiers were killed yesterday in Iraq. I can't tell you what's going on in Darfur, or Nepal, or Bangladesh. But I can tell you that rescue workers pulled an 11-month-old cat out of a wall she had been stuck in for two weeks. What does that say about the sources from which I get my news, and what does it say about me as a consumer of the American media? With whom should the blame be placed, and with whom does the responsibility lie?

My latest non-New Year's resolution is this: I have to work much, much harder to be aware of what's going on in the world, because getting my news from The Daily Show and the Yahoo! sidebar is not enough.

For starters, begin here:
Project Censored
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
Independent Media Center