Rereading my last post on Terri Schiavo, I'm amazed at how much some of my ingrained predjudices floated through to the surface. Of course, everyone's getting emotional—hell, even Quilly's quoting scripture. And Rachel's latest post complains at such length about the suffering of starvation, you'd think she'd rather we just shoot the woman and get it over with quickly. (Update: She would, for good reason.) And every time I think I couldn't possibly like the purportedly-un-brain-damaged people involved in this thing any less, there's something like this:

David Gibbs III, the parents' attorney, said that forcing Schiavo to starve would be “a mortal sin” under her Roman Catholic beliefs.

Great. So now we are to assume that a person's personal wishes are simply a mirror of the particular dogma of their church. See, a woman can choose between Catholicism, Judaism, and Islam—but if she picks Islam, she must wear a headscarf; if she picks Catholicism, she must have at least seven kids; and if she chooses Judaism, she shall be required by law to own an apartment on the lower east side and hold dinner parties for four to six highly articulate guests.

Look: Even the most optimistic assessment of Schiavo's faculties is one which, having worked with people in precisely that state in West Virginia, I'm not sure I'd want to live with. But the point is, we do not know her wishes. We just don't know.

Neither side seems particularly appealing. The husband's problems are obvious. The parents and family have been so obviously coached by the same PR flacks that “advised” the Smarts and everyone else, I wouldn't trust them if they told me the sky was blue.

Whatever else, the media is, at best, grotesquely over-simplifying a deeply complex situation. Because they're stupid. And increasingly vulture-like. And, as Jon Stewart so succinctly put it, “hurting America.” Frankly, it sucked to see Rachel abandon the usual target of her considerable wrath at the very moment when America's “journalists” most needed a lambasting.

For example, Ashley Smith, the “hero” of the Brian Nichols incident a few weeks ago, has completely dropped off the radar. In addition to hurting her bargaining position in the book and movie deal, this illustrates how pathetically shallow and short-lived coverage lasts in this country. Rachel did a wonderful job zapping Smith a while ago, and now Lee Siegel, television critic at one of the last bastions of real journalism in the country, The New Republic, has a more level-headed assessment.

Prostitution is legalized in two places in America: in Nevada and on the airwaves. One of the biggest whorehouses is CNN ... [who] thrust before the cameras evangelical pastors, ministers, and even a rabbi claiming that Smith's use of Christian sentiments to save her life was proof of God's grace and divine intervention ... and the psychological advice of a man [Viktor Frankl] who based his theories of how to cope with ordinary neurosis on what he believed was the state of mind necessary to survive a Nazi concentration camp.

[A] fantasy tale told by a woman who had a record of petty crime, and drug addiction, and burglary, and whose husband's murder by drug-dealer friends—he was trying to break free from them, we were told—was turned into an act of heroism. Well, maybe, and maybe not. No one except [CNN's Larry] King bothered to ask why Smith did not have custody of her only child, and when King posed the question to the good Reverend Page, he refused to answer it, although he had been perfectly accommodating when it came to telling Americans Smith's innermost thoughts and feelings.

Yes, that's right. America's media is in such bad shape that calling CNN a “whorehouse” is the level-headed assessment.

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