• San Francisco Chronicle, Thursday, January 26, 2006 11 AM

San Francisco Chronicle columnist Tim Goodman professes contempt for the programs seen every evening on Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. They're way too fixated, he complains, on the travails of good-looking white people. In particular, he notes the ongoing fascination with Natalee Holloway, who went missing in Aruba, and George Smith, the honeymooner who is thought to have met a terrible fate at sea late last year.(And who can forget Scott and Laci Peterson?) Enough already, bleats Goodman.  How about turning to other stories? In particular, he points Nancy, Rita, and Greta--he calls them by their first names, figuring we know who they are--to a murder that occurred the other day in the San Francisco Bay Area.  Why this particular story? Because the victim was of mixed race, and his widow is Latina--not the kind of subjects who ordinarily get the Big Treatment from the cable channels. Goodman is not optimistic that cable will cover the murder in San Francisco.  They are, in his view, "tainted with sleaze and shoddy journalism; [their] viewers are often partisan yahoos." In sum, his column is an indictment of the entire category; he does not differentiate among the channels. All cable news is equally contemptible, Goodman believes.

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