Would media cover Aung San Suu Kyi if she made cute scones?
News media serve up celebrity circuses as the world goes to you-know-where in a handbasket, writes Rick Mercier The Free Lance-Star Saturday, March 12, 2005 By Rick Mercier Determining which media outlet has provided us the dumbest Martha Stewart coverage would be a prodigious task, but the newspaper in Norfolk would have to be in the running. In last Saturday’s edition, The Virginian-Pilot put the story of Martha’s release from prison in a giant feature-page-looking centerpiece package on A1, tying it together with a headline reading “Freedom. A good thing.” Gaudy display copy highlighted “what she missed” (“the idea of cappuccino”), “what she wore” (“an ecru quilted coat and matching knit scarf, dark pants and boots”), and “what she said” (“It was kind of nice to have a rest from the material things”). Maybe I’m not cool enough to appreciate the paper’s ironic approach to presenting this story. Perhaps I should have understood that the package’s orange backdrop was a way of signaling
