Media airwaves have been dominated by a potential end to the JonBenet Ramsey murder mystery. JonBenet, who was sexually molested before being brutally murdered ten years ago, was six years old when her parents found her in the basement of her home, dead. After years of investigation, no convictions and rumors that JonBenet’s parents had murdered her themselves, John Marc Carr publicly confessed to being with JonBenet on the night she was murdered while in Thailand last month. I agree that it would be great to lock up a dangerous criminal and to clear the names of JonBenet’s parents from being involved. However, I apparently draw the line of journalistic integrity at a far earlier point than ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN or FoxNews. If you’ve picked up any newspaper or flicked on CNN’s Headline News in the past few weeks, you know exactly what I’m talking about. Whether Wolf Blitzer spends fifteen minutes analyzing Carr’s facial expression as he goes through customs in Thailand, or the New York Times reviews his gluttonous alcoholism reflected by his in-flight drink orders on his way back to the US, I have heard enough! I don’t want to place all the blame on the anchors though. Besides, they take the stories to which they are assigned. What is it, then, that has driven anchors to cover the completely irrelevant details of Carr’s life every day since his confession? In my eyes, it’s the media companies themselves. While innocent six-year-olds like JonBenet are killed by roadside bombs and miscalculated AK shots in Iraq and Lebanon every day, news stations have interrupted news briefs on the middle-east in favor of the “breaking news story” that John Marc Carr has officially landed in the United States. I don’t see any US journalists rushing to the scene when the US military slaughters innocent Iraqi children. Apparently news companies have also forgotten the ten million American children without healthcare and world hunger that kills hundreds of thousands of children each year. But while the media has a responsibility to bring the most important issues in the world to the public, the public, likewise, has a responsibility to turn the TV off or flip the page in the Boston Globe when it sees a story that it finds unimportant. Newspapers and TV stations only report John Marc Carr’s word for word description of the inside of the Ramsey’s house because the public won’t stop watching. Like a reality TV junky waiting for the next episode of Survivor, the layman waits for the next egregiously detailed description of Carr’s life. As a result, high ratings on cnn.com or ABC’s latest news viewer poll act as signals for the media to keep pumping the public full of this useless garbage. Meanwhile, events equally tragic to JonBenet Ramsey’s murder go on every day, virtually unnoticed. Until all the concerned soccer-moms and employees at the water-cooler grow tired of hearing about what Carr ate for his prison meal each day, the media will continue to prioritize the JonBenet murder case over stories that are far more important. The coverage of the JonBenet murder case is no longer about a little girl who was murdered ten years ago. Instead the media, with the public’s help, has warped what was a tragedy into a “day-in-the-life-of John Marc Carr” series, airing seven days a week. CNN, NBC, ABC, CBS and FoxNews has turned Carr into a public Pi??ata, where people with nothing better to do can study, judge and bash him to make themselves feel better. Perhaps I’m insensitive, but I can’t help but laugh at the direction of this country every time I hear another report on Carr’s most recent life events. Hopefully the public will yawn soon, ratings will go down and the media will remember that we’re in a war, that social security is drying up or that our country is in debt. Well, they’ll at least remember until new evidence in the OJ trial surfaces.